#Kenyon Writing Review Workshop

[mandyraine]

Author interview with poet Angela Chaidez Vincent

Hey everyone! I want to introduce you to my new friend, poet Angela Chaidez Vincent! We had such a great time sharing a table at the Louisville Book Festival this year, & I love her book, Arena Glow! Recommended for poetry lovers, horse lovers, and more!

It takes a rich and diverse mind to excel at both math and writing poetry, and author Angela Chaidez Vincent has just that sort of mind. I was lucky enough to share a table with her at the Louisville Book Festival this year where I learned that she is also a really fun person to hang out with! Arena Glow author Chaidez Vincent’s background is in mechanical engineering, mathematics, and…

[candiedspit]

This was actually a good year for my work…I was awarded a digital residency with RADAR productions (that I think has fizzled out, haven’t heard from the director in months) & won first place in Chariot Press’s Nonfiction Contest & my poem was highly commended by Warsan Shire for the Moth Poetry Prize & I was accepted into the Juniper Summer Writing Institute (couldn’t afford it though) & waitlisted for Kenyon Review’s Workshop & was named Poet of The Week by Brooklyn Poets (also did an interview with them) Won the Patricia Clearly Miller Award while in the hospital, Shrine was given an honorable mention for the Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize, I was awarded a residency with Anaphora but couldn’t afford it & then recently I was named a fellow with Periplus….not bad !!

[womenintranslation]

Starting this Thursday. From the PEN Translation Committee, Jill!, and DC-ALT announcement:

DC-ALT Board Member Nancy Naomi Carlson is co-organizing three virtual readings in celebration of Women in Translation Month, streaming for three consecutive Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. Find out more and stayed tuned for all three readings by clicking the links below:

Aug 13

Aug 20 - including DC-ALT Board Member Indran Amirthanayagam

Aug 27

It’s August, and time once again to celebrate Women in Translation (#WiT) Month! This initiative was started six years ago by blogger Meytal Radzinski with the purpose of focusing on translating words by women or nonbinary authors and working toward gender parity in literary publishing—so important to freedom of expression throughout the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has opened up opportunities to include translators and the authors they translate in a virtual reading format, showcasing participants who might otherwise not have been able to travel to such an event in the past.

Organized under the aegis of the PEN America Translation Committee and hosted by Jill! A Women+ in Translation Reading Series, this event will bring together five translators joined by their authors, working in such varied languages as Guatemalan Spanish, K’iche’, Hebrew, Arabic, Galician, and Senegalese French.The reading, moderated by Anna Dinwoodie, will be followed by a brief Q&A discussion (time permitting). We hope you’ll join us for this one-of-a-kind bilingual reading!

On AUGUST 13, at 1pm ET, tune in for the first LIVE bilingual readings by translators from Guatemalan Spanish & K’iche’, Hebrew, Arabic, Galician, and Senegalese French. This reading will be livestreamed; you can RSVP and tune in via the Facebook page of our host, Jill: A Women+ in Translation Reading Series.

Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez is a Guatemalan-American poet, translator,and Literature Ph.D. Candidate at UC Santa Cruz. Her work appears in Centro Mariconadas: A Queer and Trans Central American Anthology (forthcoming) and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States (2017). She attended the Kenyon Review Translators Workshop with a scholarship.

Rosa Chávez is a Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel poet, playwright, artist, and activist who is Guatemala Program Coordinator for the international feminist organization JASS Mesoamerica. She has published five books of poetry, including El corazón de la piedra(2010), and the play AWAS (2014). Her poetry has been widely anthologized and translated.

Joanna Chen is a literary translator and writer. Her full-length translations include two books of poetry (Less Like a Dove and Frayed Light, a finalist for the Jewish National Book Award) and a book of nonfiction, My Wild Garden. She writes a column for The Los Angeles Review of Books.  

Tehila Hakimi is an award-winning Hebrew poet and fiction writer. She was a 2018 Fulbright fellow at The University of Iowa. Hakimi has published a poetry collection (We’ll Work Tomorrow), a graphic novel (In the Water) and a collection of novellas (Company). Hakimi is a mechanical engineer by profession.

Melanie Magidow is the founder of Marhaba Language Expertise, providing Arabic to English translation and other multilingual services. She holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of Texas at Austin. Magidow has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Commission. She is also a co-host of the Goodreads MENA Lit Book Group. For more on her projects, see melaniemagidow.com.

Reem Bassiouney was born in Alexandria, Egypt. She obtained her M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Oxford University in linguistics. In addition to more than 8 books in linguistics, Bassiouney has 7 novels and has won numerous awards. Her novels have been translated into English, Greek, and Spanish. Her most recent masterpiece, "أولاد الناسثلاثية المماليك" 'Sons of the People: The Mamluk Trilogy' was published in 2018. Reem Bassiouney was awarded the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Award from Egypt's Supreme Council for Culture for the best Egyptian novel of the year 2019/2020, making her the first woman to win this prize.

Laura Cesarco Eglin translates from Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician. She co-translated Fabián Severo’s Night in the North (Eulalia Books). Her translation of Hilda Hilst’s Of Death. Minimal Odes, (co•im•press) won the 2019 Best Translated Book Award.Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Yorker, and more. Cesarco Eglin is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals (Thirty West Publishing House). She is the publisher of Veliz Books.

Lara Dopazo Ruibal has published four poetry collections and she is the co-editor and co-author of the experimental essay volume Através das marxes: Entrelazando feminismos, ruralidades e comúns. Her poetry collection ovella was awarded the Francisco Añón Prizein 2015, and with claus e o alacrán she received the Fiz Vergara Vilariño Prize in 2017. Dopazo Ruibal was a resident artist at the Spanish Royal Academy in Rome for the academic year 2018/2019.  

Aubrey D. Jones is Assistant Professor of French at Weber State University in Utah. She received her Ph.D. in French Literature from the University at Buffalo-SUNY and has also worked in freelance translation since 2010. Aubrey is now involved in building Translation Studies in French at Weber State, as well as undertaking the translation of works of Franco-Ontarian and Senegalese poetry and fiction. She lives in Ogden, Utah with her husband and three children, and will often be found wandering in the mountains when not in her office.

Ken Bugul was born in Senegal in 1947 as Mariétou Mbaye. In her native language, Wolof, her pen name means “one who is not wanted.” From 1986 to 1993 she worked for the NGO IPPF (International Planned Parenthood Federation) in Kenya, Togo and the Congo. Ken Bugul’s autobiographical debut novel Le Baobab Fou was published in 1982 and is one of the most important documents in the Francophone literature of West Africa from the 1980s. Since then, Bugul has published many novels, which have been translated into several languages. Characteristic of her work is a highly literary language densely woven with the rhythms and fundamental thought structures of Wolof.

This reading will be moderated by Anna Dinwoodie, a poet and German-English translator. Anna received a Katharine Bakeless Nason scholarship to attend the Bread Loaf Translators Conference in 2019, and her writing appears in the anthology Poets of Queens (August 2020). She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY.

[fatehbaz]

New Poetry by Queer Indigenous Women - A Series Curated by Natalie Diaz - Literary Hub - 12 April 2018

The words of Natalie Diaz:

In my Mojave culture, many of our songs are maps, but not in the sense of an American map. Mojave song-maps do not draw borders or boundaries, do not say this is knowable, or defined, or mine. Instead our maps use language to tell about our movements and wonderings (not wanderings) across a space, naming what has happened along the way while also compelling us toward what is waiting to be discovered, where we might go and who we might meet or become along the way.

This feature of indigenous women is meant to be like those song-maps, to offer myriad ways of “poetic” and linguistic experience—a journey through or across memory, or imagination, across pain or joy or the impossibility of each, across our bodies of land and water and flesh and ink—an ever-shifting, ever-returning, ever-realizing map of movement, of discovery, of possibility, of risk—of indigenous and native poetry. It is my luck to welcome you to this indigenous space and invite you into the conversations of these poems, languages, imageries and wonders. In the first installment of this bi-monthly feature, I’m pleased to share the work of Noʻu Revilla, Janet McAdams, Lehua M. Taitano, Deborah A. Miranda, and Arianne True.

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Noʻu Revilla is a queer Indigenous poet and educator of Hawaiian and Tahitian descent. Born and raised on the island of Maui, she has performed and facilitated creative writing workshops throughout Hawaiʻi as well as in Canada, Papua New Guinea, and at the United Nations. Her work has been exhibited at the Honolulu Museum of Art and appears in Poetry magazine, Black Renaissance Noire, The Missing Slate, Hawaiʻi Review, and Poem of the Week by Kore Press. Her chapbook Say Throne was published by Tinfish Press in 2011, and she is currently finishing her PhD in creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa.

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Janet McAdams is the author of three poetry collections, most recently the chapbook Seven Boxes for the Country After.  With Geary Hobson and Kathryn Walkiewicz, she coedited the anthology The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal. A writer of mixed Scottish, Irish, and Creek (Muscogee) ancestry, she grew up in Alabama and now lives in Ohio, where she teaches at Kenyon College.

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Lehua M. Taitano, a native Chamoru from Yigo, Guåhan (Guam), is a queer writer and interdisciplinary artist.  She is the author of two volumes of poetry–Inside Me an Island (forthcoming 2018) and A Bell Made of Stones. Her chapbook,  appalachiapacific, won the 2010 Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction, and her most recent chapbook, Sonoma, was published by Dropleaf Press in 2017. She hustles her way through the capitalist labyrinth as a bike mechanic who sometimes gets paid to make art.

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Arianne True (Choctaw, Chickasaw) is a queer poet and folk artist who has worked everywhere from the temperate rainforest canopy to the rocky edges of the Salish Sea. Arianne has taught and mentored with Writers in the Schools (WITS), YouthSpeaks Seattle, and the Richard Hugo House, and has served as a guest editor for cloudthroat. In May, Arianne will graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

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Deborah A. Miranda is the author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award), as well as three poetry collections, Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, and Raised By Humans.  She is co-editor of Sovereign Erotics: An Anthology of Two-Spirit Literature and her collection of essays, The Hidden Stories of Isabel Meadows and Other California Indian Lacunae is under contract with U of Nebraska Press.  Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California.  As John Lucian Smith Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, Deborah teaches Creative Writing (poetry and memoir), composition, and literature of the margins (Native American, Chicana/o, LGBTQ, African American, Asian American, mixed-genre, experimental).

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Read more, including some poems from each of the listed writers.

[chpinthestacks]

Shift: A Reading with Kathryn Savage

CHP In the Stacks Presents Shift: A Reading with Kathryn Savage, Victoria Blanco, Angela Pelster, and Moheb Soliman. Wednesday, April 24th, at 7 p.m. at the American Swedish Institute.

Coffee House Press and the American Swedish Institute are thrilled to present Shift: A Reading and Artist Talk with Kathryn Savage, Victoria Blanco, Angela Pelster, and Moheb Soliman. Join current CHP in the Stacks resident Kathryn Savage as she reads and discusses new work created during her residency at the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland, with friends and writers whose work is interdisciplinary and fits within themes of shifting, art in the anthropocene, place, identity, and grief.

This event is curated by Kathryn Savage, and the artist discussion will be moderated by Angela Pelster. The reading and conversations will be at the beautiful American Swedish Institute in the Folke Bernadotte Conference Room. ASI will be open that evening, so join us before or after for a visit to the mansion or the exhibit of Erik Johansson's photography!

The reading and discussion will be followed by a short Q&A and reception.

https://www.facebook.com/events/416803732431514/

About the artists:

Victoria Blanco is a writer from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. Her research and writing have been supported by a Fulbright Award, a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, a Bakeless Scholarship from Bread Loaf Orion, a writing residency at St. Paul's East Side Freedom Library from CHP in the Stacks, and the 2018 Roxane Gay Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction for the Jack Jones Literary Arts writers' retreat. She was a fellow in the 2017-2018 Loft Mentor Series. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Bat City Review, and Fourth Genre.

Angela Pelster’s most recent book Limber won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for best new book in nonfiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Tin House, Granta, the Kenyon Review and the Gettysburg Review, among others. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and was recently awarded a fellowship in nonfiction to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and a Minnesota State Arts Board grant. She is the founder and director of Writers Go to the Movies and teaches at Hamline University in St Paul.

Kathryn Savage is a recipient of the 2018 Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize. A hybrid writer, her work appears or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Poets.org, the Guardian, Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, the Village Voice, and The Best Small Fictions of 2015. She currently teaches writing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), and at the University of Minnesota, where she is pursuing a second MFA in poetry. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, the Weisman Art Museum, the O'Rourke Travel Fellowship and the Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship from the University of Minnesota. She is a program manager at the Loft Literary Center and volunteers with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest whose work is often oriented by themes of nature, modernity, identity, and belonging, often taking shape in writing, performance, and installation projects. In recent years he’s focused on the Great Lakes bioregion/borderland, presenting work under the banner HOMES [Huron Ontario Michigan Erie Superior] in diverse US and Canadian art and public spaces, and he will soon be publishing a related poetry collection with Coffee House Press. Previously, he’s also been awarded grants and fellowships and other support from the Joyce Foundation, Forecast Public Art, Pillsbury House, and the Banff Centre, among others. Moheb has degrees from The New School for Social Research and the University of Toronto, and before his Tulsa Artist Fellowship, he worked as Program Director for the Arab American contemporary lit/art organization Mizna. See more at mohebsoliman.info and agreatlakesvista.tumblr.com.

Kathryn Savage is a fiscal year 2019 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

[sfsucw]

Omnidawn's Single Poem Broadside Poetry Contest!

Accepting electronic & postal submissions: March 1 to April 22.

Open to all writers: no expectations or limits regarding the amount of poetry a writer has published.

Winner receives $1,000, letterpress publication of broadside, 50 copies, and publication of the winning poem in OmniVerse.

Dan Beachy-Quick will judge:

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of six books of poetry, North True South Bright (2003), Spell (2004), Mulberry (2006), This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009), and Circle's Apprentice (2011, Winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry), and gentlessness (2015). He is also the author of a book of interlinked meditations on Herman Melville s Moby-Dick, titled A Whaler s Dictionary (2008), a collection of essays, meditations, and fairy tales, Wonderful Investigations (2012), a study on John Keats, A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work (2015), and most recently, a collection of essays, fragments, and poems, Of Silence and Song (2017).  His pocket series or chapbooks include SHIELDS & SHARDS & STITCHES & SONGS (Omnidawn) & the forthcoming Variations on Dawn & Dusk (Omnidawn). Two book-length collaborative projects are also available: Conversities (2012, with Srikanth Reddy) and Work from Memory (21012, with Matthew Goulish). His poems have appeared widely in such journals as The Boston Review, The New Republic, Fence, Poetry, Chicago Review, VOLT, Colorado Review, and New American Writing. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Southern Review, The Poker, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Denver Quarterly, Interim, and elsewhere. His essays have been marked "notable" in multiple collections of Best American Essays, and poetry has been included in Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Residency and has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, and a finalist for The William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. In 2016 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. He teaches poetry workshops and literature courses. at Colorado State University.

For more info: www.omnidawn.com/contest

[devoutjunk]

I started getting that familiar, creeping feeling lying in bed last night: that my present happiness was too good to be true and that somehow, the universe would find a way to sabotage it (if I didn’t do the job, myself, first).

Because of this disaster-is-imminent mindset, I’ve always been a little ashamed or scared to share my own successes, as if doing so would jinx me. But 2018 has been a year of necessary, hard-won growth and I want to document that for the next time imposter syndrome is bludgeoning me over the head. I belong here. I am good at what I do. And I am always, always striving to be better.

In 2018, I was diagnosed with an infection of the six-year-old instrumentation in my back. I had my third spinal surgery to remove the infected instrumentation and found out in October that unless my situation changes, I won’t need another surgery to replace the hardware like it had been believed I would. 

I reached my one year anniversary of being self-harm free.

I celebrated two years with my partner, M., and we moved into an apartment together. And bought a calico kitten named Harper, who is the deep and abiding love of my life. (Sorry, M.)

I graduated college. I started interning with Green Writers Press and was asked to continue on as Poetry Editor this fall. I’ve edited four manuscripts of poetry so far, including one by the almost 90 year-old former director of Breadloaf, as well as our Hopper Prize winning manuscript, a book I would adore as a reader but have grown to love even more as an editor. I even got my first significant check for freelance work. 

After feeling unproductive and stuck as a writer for most of my senior year, attending the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop reinvigorated me and reminded me why when the workshop model is done well, it can be the setting of some of my best work. I got to mine Carl Phillips for advice and gossip over drinks at the one (1) local tavern in Gambier, Ohio, and meet Tiana Clark, another poetry hero, who was so affirming and supportive. 

In December, my poems were featured as Poached Hare’s monthly special, after I was solicited for more writing from a magazine for the first time. I also was a finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize and one of the poems from that submission will be published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, one of my dream publications. I received two more acceptances for poems due out in December from deLuge Journal and CrabFat Magazine (another magazine I’ve been obsessed with forever). This past week, I received the first personal rejection for my manuscript, “Lambflesh,” with some incredibly kind, insightful feedback (and the assurance that at least one of the panelists had liked the collection enough to vote for it!). Oddly, this rejection was one of the most exciting pieces of news to me. I think because it felt good just to be seen, to be recognized, but also to have affirmed that while there is promise in my collection, I still have a lot of work to do to polish and perfect it. I am nowhere near perfect. But I am happy. And for once, allowing myself to be. 

[writerystuff]

WRITING THE QUIET POEM

From the North Carolina Writers’ Network:

We live in a world dominated by sound bites, inflammatory headlines, and 30-second soapbox diatribes. More often than not, it is the loudest voice that gets heard.

How then should poets respond? Is there room for poets to move in the "negative" space, in the margins and mortar, and to do so in a powerful way that lets them cut through the noise and touch readers in an authentic way?

On Tuesday, March 12 at 7:00 pm, poet Leila Chatti will lead the online class "Hush: Writing the Quiet Poem."

Registration is now open.

This course is capped at forty (40) registrants, first-come, first-served. There is a $30 fee to register.

In a time of seemingly endless bustle and noise, a quiet moment can be rare or too easily overlooked. In this workshop, we’ll turn the volume down and discuss how to notice and render the poetry of these “ordinary” moments. Using the work of masters such as Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield, Li-Young Lee, and Louise Glück, we will learn how to best use the tools of breath, space, syntax, and the line, and to recognize and communicate the power and beauty in what does not shout for attention, but quietly demands it.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors' Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar; grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation; and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing.

Her poems have received awards from Ploughshares' Emerging Writer's Contest, Narrative's30 Below Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, she was the first North African poet to be shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She is the Consulting Poetry Editor for the Raleigh Reviewand her work appears in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.

"Hush: Writing the Quiet Poem" is the North Carolina Writers' Network's fourth and final offering in their 2018-2019 Winter Series of online classes.

"This program is a great way for writers from all over North Carolina to connect without having the hassle of driving somewhere and finding parking," said NCWN communications director Charles Fiore. "Online classes offer top-shelf instruction for a fraction of the cost, and the software itself is very intuitive and easy to use."

The online class "Hush: Writing the Quiet Poem" is available to anyone with an internet connection, or who even owns just a telephone. Instructions for accessing the online class on Tuesday, March 12, will be sent to registrants no less than twenty-four hours prior to the start of class.

Register now.

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY:What the Body Already Knows –2021 NWVS WINNERby K.E. Ogden

TO ORDER GO TO: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/what-the-body-already-knows-by-k-e-ogden-nwvs-164-2021-nwvs-winner/

RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY

In this award-winning, debut chapbook, K.E. Ogden turns our gaze to mapping grief as a transformative journey of resilience. These are songs of devotion to mud, bird shit, dead bodies, hot biscuits, a cat’s torn ear, shovels, and sawdust. Each poem translates tragedy into gateways for metamorphosis, inviting readers to make new worlds in changed landscapes, to see beauty in dark, shark-infested waters, and to find elation and joy in being alive.

K.E. Ogden is a poet, essayist, book artist and educator. Kirsten grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i and the SF Bay Area, and she spent almost every summer of her teen and twenty-something years in East Louisiana roaming the backroads with her grandmother. She loves writing on porches and still uses a typewriter for most things. A poet laureate of Gambier, Ohio, she teaches in Gambier each summer with the Kenyon Review Young Writer workshops and is one of the founding bloggers for KRO: Kenyon Review Online. A two-time judge for the Flannery O’Connor short fiction prize, Kirsten is also a former recipient of a Poetry Fellowship to Changsha, China from the CSULA Center for Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and a winner of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Award for her poem “My Atoms Come from Those Stars.” Her essays, poetry, and fiction have been published in Brevity, KRO: Kenyon Review Online, Louisiana Literature, Streetlight Magazine, Windhover, andberbo and elsewhere. Her digital quilt piece “My President: A Politics of Hope” was published at UnstitchedStates.com as part of a project curated by writer Gretchen Henderson. Kirsten is a certified Narrative Therapist and chairs the Creative Writing Committee at Pasadena City College. She believes that writing and poetry have the power to heal and to change the world. To learn more,

visit her website at kirstenogden.com

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR What the Body Already Knows by K.E. Ogden – NWVS #164 – 2021 NWVS WINNER

K. E. Ogden‘s stunning chapbook, “What the Body Already Knows,” is a journey through grief for a father who “hung the sun” and a troubled mother who lives in memory as “fingerprints in the tops of all those biscuits.” Every poem is rooted in the world of the body—of those we love, of the earth, and of the sea, where the poet surprises herself by “singing underwater,” a perfect metaphor for what Ogden’s poetry accomplishes: a music all her own, rising, above all odds, from sorrow’s depths.

–Rebecca McClanahan, author of In the Key of New York City and The Tribal Knot

Every once in a precious while, a book comes into my life that shakes me out of my long days and worries, one that offers me honesty and real connection to its author. K.E. Ogden‘s new collection of poetry, What the Body Already Knows, is exactly that kind of book. These poems provide an atlas of loss, both to it and away from it, line by line. Whether telling the story of a mother lost in her sleep, a day lost to rumination over the corpse of a deer, or an entire year lost to loss itself, these poems show a way through it all. Yes, there is pain here, and fear, hospital rooms, and heavy memories from hard days, but these poems are much more than specimens lined up as examples of troubles in a drawer. They are alive, and colorful, and covered in all manner of beauty to render life’s real value.

–Jack B. Bedell, author of Color All Maps New, Poet Laureate, State of Louisiana, 2017-2019

K. E. Ogden‘s What the Body Already Knows begins with a father highlighting for his daughter the way out. Of course there is no way out. This collection chronicles the “year of forgot to breathe,” the year both parents die. In a pastoral scene, we see the pond filled with tires and truck parts, the pond where they throw in a dead deer on the count of three. These harsh, beautiful poems stun us with honesty, grit, and transformation.

–Peggy Shumaker, author of CAIRN and Gnawed Bones

K.E. Ogden‘s “What the Body Already Knows” manifests the circular and cyclical nature of grief with stunning directness and clarity. These poems are “muckings of primordial mud,” yet amazingly they give words to what cannot be said. Ogden examines the wreckage of loss, and these parts are “scooped up to make a new world.” I have never thought of loss as a mirror before reading these poems, but grief in this collection becomes a way of seeing the self in a world forever changed.

–Adam Clay, author of To Make Room for the Sea

Please share/please repost [PROMO] #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry

[thenoisyisland]

Erasure

I was maybe five hundred years old, in the midst of history, trying to explain something. The only words we knew were pivo and dobro.   When the waiter brought cooked lamb brains in a paper bag, we recalled how the waiter made a circle, then knocked his forehead. Music rose from the street, and the warm breeze smelled of foliage and the dust of a thousand years.   The waiter is dead now, killed by casual laughter.   Scattered into the dark, perhaps glittering somewhere, they still move, creatures that love and slaughter.

Albert Zhang is Head Editor for The Westminster School’s Bi-Line, the school newspaper, and oversees as Sports Section Editor as well. He is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of Evolutions Magazine, The Westminster Schools’s annual creative writing magazine. Albert attended The Kenyon Review workshop, was a SCAD Silver Scholar, is a multiple Gold Key Scholastic Arts and Writing winner across media, and has been published in Celebrating Art Magazine, Writer’s Digest, Amazing Kids! Magazine, *82 Review, BAZOOF! Magazine, Sprout Magazine, Sooth Swarm Journal, and more. His work has been exhibited at Atlanta’s High Museum, Capitol Building, and National Fair.

[cambridgewritersworkshop]

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is delighted to have our writing faculty from our 2018 Summer in Paris Writing Retreat featured at SpokenWord Paris and Paris Lit Up this summer!

SpokenWord Paris featuring Kathleen Spivack Adrian Leeds’ Après-Midi (Café de la Mairie) * 3-5 pm corner of rue des Archives & rue de Bretagne Paris, France 75003

Kathleen Spivack will read from her latest novel Unspeakable Things, which deals with refugees from Eastern Europe coming over to New York during World War II. The main characters are members of a string quartet smuggled out of Europe and deals with their displacement and eventual redemption.

Begun in France while the Maurice Papon Trials were going on, in Unspeakable ThingsKathleen weaves her own family’s experience as immigrant refugees with her encounters with individuals she met when she lived and taught in the French university system off and on for almost 30 years. France has been a home and a temporary way stop for people escaping oppression, and this is why Kathleen is so very happy to be able to share this novel with you.

Kathleen Spivack is the author of ten books, prose and poetry (Knopf, Doubleday, Graywolf, etc).  Her most recent novel Unspeakable Things (Knopf) centers on European refugees in New York City, struggling to survive during the last years of the Second World War. Kathleen’s previous book was With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Plath, Sexton, Bishop, Rich, Kunitz and others (University Press of New England). Kathleen arrived in Boston in 1959 on a scholarship to study with Robert Lowell. Lowell introduced her to the poets of that time, who took her under their wing. This memoir centers on how these poets approached their work.

Other books include: A History of Yearning, Winner of the Sows Ear International Poetry Prize 2010, the London Book Festival Poetry Prize, and others; Moments of Past Happiness (Earthwinds/Grolier Editions); The Beds We Lie In (Scarecrow), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; The Honeymoon (Graywolf); Swimmer in the Spreading Dawn (Applewood); The Jane Poems (Doubleday); and Flying Inland(Doubleday). She has also published in magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Chicago Review, Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Solas Awards, and many others. Her work has also been translated into French.  Her work has been featured at festivals in France and in the United States. She performs in theatres, often with music. Kathleen is a recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and a Discovery Winner among many others. She has also received grants from the Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Arts and various organizations. Her residencies include Yaddo, MacDowell, the American Academy in Rome, Ragdale, Karolyi Foundation, etc.

Since 1990, Kathleen has been a visiting professor of American Literature/Creative Writing (one semester annually) throughout the French University System. In the U.S. she directs an advanced writing program and has been named by the National Writers’ Union as “best writing coach”. Her students have published widely and won major prizes. You will too! For more information on Kathleen Spivack, please visit her website at  www.kathleenspivack.org. You can also follow her on Facebook.

Paris Lit Up featuring Rita Banerjee Culture Rapide * July 26, 2018 * 8:45 – 11:00 pm 103 rue Julien Lacroix, 75020 Paris, France

Paris Lit Up will host Rita Banerjee as their featured writer on July 16, 2018 from 8:45 – 11:00 pm!  Banerjee will read from her new poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (FLP, march 2018), which was selected by Finishing Line Press as their 2018 nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry, and her edited volume CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018).  Banerjee will also read from her new collection of essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool, and her novel-in-progress about a Tamil-Jewish family in crisis during a post-authoritarian regime. 

Paris Lit Up  is a non-profit community organization that aims to intensify collaborative artistic practices through community events, performance and publication.  With emphasis on transnational writers, artists and musicians, Paris Lit Up promotes the importance of artistic synergy through transparent, democratic, consensus-based decision making.

Rita Banerjee is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018).  She is the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018),which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018”, was nominated for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was selected by Finishing Line Press as their 2018 nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry.  Banerjee is also the author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and she is a recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Grant, the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, and South Asia Initiative and Tata Grants. Her writing appears in the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Nat. Brut., The Scofield, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, The Fiction Project, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. She is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an Associate Scholar at Harvard, and the judge for the 2017 Minerva Rising “Dare to Speak” Poetry Chapbook Contest. She is currently working on a novel, a documentary film about race and intimacy, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, and a collection of lyric essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool.

More information about Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats and CREDO Book Tours available here!

Paris Lit Up featuring Kristina Marie Darling Culture Rapide * August 9, 2018 * 8:45 – 11:00 pm 103 rue Julien Lacroix, 75020 Paris, France

Cancel any August vacation right now. Why? Because we are incredibly luckily to be hosting the writer extraordinaire Kristina Marie Darling on August 9 at the PLU open mic! Sign up from 8pm, wiggle your bums down around 8.45pm. Here’s her delicious bio… seriously, read it.

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty books, including Look to Your Left: The Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2020); Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations (C&R Press, 2017), which was named one of the “Best Books of 2017” by The Brooklyn Rail; and DARK HORSE: Poems (C&R Press, 2018). Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held both the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; three residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Morris Fellowship in the Arts; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among many other awards and honors. Her poems appear in The Harvard Review, Poetry International, New American Writing, Nimrod, Passages North, The Mid-American Review, and on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org. She has published essays in The Kenyon Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and numerous other magazines. Kristina currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly.

July 10, 26, & August 9, 2018: SpokenWord Paris feat. Kathleen Spivack & Paris Lit Up feat. Rita Banerjee & Kristina Marie Darling The Cambridge Writers' Workshop is delighted to have our writing faculty from our 2018 Summer in Paris Writing Retreat featured at SpokenWord Paris and Paris Lit Up this summer!

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Blog tour! Let’s talk a bit about The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE Author: Nancy Jooyoun Kim ISBN: 9780778310174 Publication Date: September 1, 2020 Publisher: Park Row Books

THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE (on sale: September 1, 2020; Park Row Books; Hardcover; $27.99 US/ $34.99 CAN). opens when Margot Lee’s mother, Mina, doesn’t return her calls. It’s a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and finds that her mother has suspiciously died. The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the tenuous and invisible strings that held together her single mother’s life as a Korean War orphan and an undocumented immigrant, only to realize how little she truly knew about her mother.

Interwoven with Margot's present-day search is Mina's story of her first year in Los Angeles as she navigates the promises and perils of the American myth of reinvention. While she's barely earning a living by stocking shelves at a Korean grocery store, the last thing Mina ever expects is to fall in love. But that love story sets in motion a series of events that have consequences for years to come, leading up to the truth of what happened the night of her death.

Buy Links: Harlequin Barnes & Noble Amazon Books-A-Million Powell’s

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a graduate of UCLA and the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, The Offing, the blogs of Prairie Schooner and Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her essay, “Love (or Live Cargo),” was performed for NPR/PRI’s Selected Shorts in 2017 with stories by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Phil Klay, and Etgar Keret. THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE is her first novel. 

Excerpt:

Margot

2014

Margot's final conversation with her mother had seemed so uneventful, so ordinary—another choppy bilingual plod. Half-understandable. 

Business was slow again today. Even all the Korean businesses downtown are closing. 

What did you eat for dinner?

Everyone is going to Target now, the big stores. It costs the same and it's cleaner.   

Margot imagined her brain like a fishing net with the loosest of weaves as she watched the Korean words swim through. She had tried to tighten the net before, but learning another language, especially her mother's tongue, frustrated her. Why didn't her mother learn to speak English?

But that last conversation was two weeks ago. And for the past few days, Margot had only one question on her mind: Why didn't her mother pick up the phone?

****

Since Margot and Miguel had left Portland, the rain had been relentless and wild. Through the windshield wipers and fogged glass, they only caught glimpses of fast food and gas stations, motels and billboards, premium outlets and "family fun centers." Margot’s hands were stiff from clenching the steering wheel. The rain had started an hour ago, right after they had made a pit stop in north Portland to see the famous 31-foot-tall Paul Bunyan sculpture with his cartoonish smile, red-and-white checkered shirt on his barrel chest, his hands resting on top of an upright axe.

Earlier that morning, Margot had stuffed a backpack and a duffel with a week's worth of clothes, picked up Miguel from his apartment with two large suitcases and three houseplants, and merged onto the freeway away from Seattle, driving Miguel down for his big move to Los Angeles. They'd stop in Daly City to spend the night at Miguel's family's house, which would take about ten hours to get to. At the start of the drive, Miguel had been lively, singing along to "Don't Stop Believing" and joking about all the men he would meet in LA. But now, almost four hours into the road trip, Miguel was silent with his forehead in his palm, taking deep breaths as if trying hard not to think about anything at all.

"Everything okay?" Margot asked.

"I'm just thinking about my parents."

"What about your parents?" Margot lowered her foot on the gas.

"Lying to them," he said.

"About why you're really moving down to LA?" The rain splashed down like a waterfall. Miguel had taken a job offer at an accounting firm in a location more conducive to his dreams of working in theatre. For the last two years, they had worked together at a nonprofit for people with disabilities. She was as an administrative assistant; he crunched numbers in finance. She would miss him, but she was happy for him, too. He would finally finish writing his play while honing his acting skills with classes at night. "The theatre classes? The plays that you write? The Grindr account?"

"About it all."

"Do you ever think about telling them?"

"All the time." He sighed. "But it's easier this way."

"Do you think they know?"

"Of course, they do. But..." He brushed his hand through his hair. "Sometimes, agreeing to the same lie is what makes a family family, Margot."

"Ha. Then what do you call people who agree to the same truth?"

"Uh, scientists?"

She laughed, having expected him to say friends. Gripping the wheel, she caught the sign for Salem.

"Do you need to use the bathroom?" she asked.

"I'm okay. We're gonna stop in Eugene, right?"

"Yeah, should be another hour or so."

"I'm kinda hungry." Rustling in his pack on the floor of the backseat, he found an apple, which he rubbed clean with the edge of his shirt. "Want a bite?"

"Not now, thanks."

His teeth crunched into the flesh, the scent cracking through the odor of wet floor mats and warm vents. Margot was struck by a memory of her mother's serene face—the downcast eyes above the high cheekbones, the relaxed mouth—as she peeled an apple with a paring knife, conjuring a continuous ribbon of skin. The resulting spiral held the shape of its former life. As a child, Margot would delicately hold this peel like a small animal in the palm of her hand, this proof that her mother could be a kind of magician, an artist who told an origin story through scraps—this is the skin of a fruit, this is its smell, this is its color.

"I hope the weather clears up soon," Miguel said, interrupting the memory. "It gets pretty narrow and windy for a while. There's a scary point right at the top of California where the road is just zigzagging while you're looking down cliffs. It's like a test to see if you can stay on the road."

"Oh, God,” Margot said. “Let's not talk about it anymore."

As she refocused on the rain-slicked road, the blurred lights, the yellow and white lines like yarn unspooling, Margot thought about her mother who hated driving on the freeway, her mother who no longer answered the phone. Where was her mother?

The windshield wipers squeaked, clearing sheets of rain.

"What about you?" Miguel asked. "Looking forward to seeing your mom? When did you see her last?"

Margot's stomach dropped. "Last Christmas," she said. "Actually, I've been trying to call her for the past few days to let her know, to let her know that we would be coming down." Gripping the wheel, she sighed. "I didn't really want to tell her because I wanted this to be a fun trip, but then I felt bad, so..."

"Is everything okay?"

"She hasn't been answering the phone."

"Hmm." He shifted in his seat. "Maybe her phone battery died?"

"It's a landline. Both landlines—at work and at home."

"Maybe she's on vacation?"

"She never goes on vacation." The windshield fogged, revealing smudges and streaks, past attempts to wipe it clean. She cranked up the air inside.

"Hasn't she ever wanted to go somewhere?"

"Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. I don't know why, but she's always wanted to go there."

"It's a big ol' crack in the ground, Margot. Why wouldn't she want to see it? It's God's crack."

"It's some kind of Korean immigrant rite of passage. National Parks, reasons to wear hats and khaki, stuff like that. It's like America America."

"I bet she's okay,” Miguel said. “Maybe she's just been busier than usual, right? We'll be there soon enough."

"You're probably right. I'll call her again when we stop."

A heaviness expanded inside her chest. She fidgeted with the radio dial but caught only static with an occasional glimpse of a commercial or radio announcer's voice.

Her mother was fine. They would all be fine.

With Miguel in LA, she'd have more reasons to visit now.

The road lay before them like a peel of fruit. The windshield wipers hacked away the rivers that fell from the sky.

Excerpted from The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim, Copyright © 2020 by Nancy Jooyoun Kim Published by Park Row Books

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Conversations | Desirée Alvarez

“I think it’s an opportune moment to be reading, since we need escape and uplift right now. Sharing poetry and other writing online, whether by recording, video, or in print will find an eager audience.”

Three-time NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow Desirée Alvarez (Printmaking/Drawings/Artist Books ’97, ’03 and Poetry ’11) talked to NYFA Learning about the challenges of launching a new book during the COVID-19 pandemic. Get inspired by the poet and painter’s optimist approach to the opportunities these difficult times might present to literary artists.  

NYFA: Your latest collection, Raft of Flame, is recently out from Omnidawn. What has your process of promoting and presenting the book been like as we move through this challenging time?

DA: It’s been surprisingly wonderful. My extraordinary publisher Omnidawn rose to the occasion and has been promoting the book and offering free shipping to anyone ordering it from them. They plan to make a video of me reading as well. Poets House and Paolo Javier have been extremely supportive. They created a series called “Poets House Presents," with poets reading from their work and offering craft talks where I've been invited to read from the new book. 

The book was lucky to receive a glowing pre-publication review from Publishers Weekly. I’m also very grateful to journals like Massachusetts Review and Poetry Magazine for making poems from the book available online. I’m grateful to Kenyon Review, Alonso Llerena, and Rosebud Ben-Oni for reviewing my book last week. When the world re-opens, I hope to do some readings. I feel a little cursed on the book promotion front. After my first book came out, my mom became ill and passed away the following year. Now I have a new book, Raft of Flame, and the world is ill. Many readings were canceled. But some people have more time to read and listen to poetry right now, so it’s heartwarming to hear that the poems are bringing solace at a tough time.

NYFA: What sort of advice do you have for poets and other literary artists who may be finding it difficult to write or seek opportunities at the moment?

DA: I think it’s an opportune moment to be reading, since we need escape and uplift right now. Sharing poetry and other writing online, whether by recording, video, or in print will find an eager audience. It’s also an extraordinary opportunity to be focused in the studio or at the writing desk. My students are making powerful work— it’s inspiring. I recommend finding a writing partner or starting a group. It’s a good time to take classes online, and to consult Poets & Writers Magazine to see what programs, residencies, or contests there are to apply for in the future.

NYFA: Like many of our readers, you're a multidisciplinary artist. How does painting inform the poetry you write, or vice-versa?

DA: I tend to work on both painting and poetry at the same time. My painting installations on fabric are often how I begin and develop my poems, so the two processes are fused. For example, I have paintings at Brooklyn Botanic Garden Conservatory Gallery on exhibit now through November with poetry that relates to the poems in Raft of Flame. I like to work through the ideas and emotions in variant scaffoldings. The soil changes, so they grow in different ways. I hope the poems look like paintings in Raft of Flame. Not in a concrete poetry way, but in the sense that I’d like certain phrases, be they images or sounds, to have space and time to breathe and exist in the reader’s eye the way that a shape or color area exists in a composition. Raft of Flame considers a civilization and its culture coming apart, being apocalyptically scattered and then hybridized, so I hope that comes through in how some of the poems look. The art in the book explores legacy on both sides of the ocean. I try to bring that ancestry to life by giving voice to the sculptures of the Aztecs, as well as the paintings of Spanish painters, such as Velázquez. I also hope to summon back the words written by the recorders of this violent history. It’s important to keep these stories alive beyond an academic format.

About Desirée Alvarez Desirée Alvarez is a painter and poet living in New York City. Her second book, Raft of Flame, won the Lake Merritt Poetry Contest selected by Hoa Nguyen and is published by Omnidawn. Her paintings will be on view at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Conservatory Gallery through November. Celebrating magical connections between animals, plants, and humans, she has received three NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowships, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and European Capital of Culture. Her first book, Devil’s Paintbrush, won the 2015 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Award. Her poetry is anthologized in What Nature (MIT Press, 2018) and featured in Other Musics: New Latina Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). She has published poems in Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, Fence, Poetry, and The Iowa Review. Currently an artist-in-residence at the New-York Historical Society, Alvarez teaches at CUNY, The Juilliard School, and is teaching a workshop called “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” at Poets House this spring.

- Interview Conducted by Alicia Ehni, Program Officer and Kyle Lopez, REDC Fellow

This post is part of the ConEdison Immigrant Artist Program Newsletter #128. Subscribe to this free monthly e-mail for artist’s features, opportunities, and events. Learn more about NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program.

Image: Desirée Alvarez, Photo Credit: Omnidawn Publishing

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Chautauqua Announces 2017 Pushcart Nominations

Chautauqua, the literary journal of Chautauqua Institution, has nominated six contributors featured in Chautauqua 14: Invention and Discovery for the Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series has been published once a year since 1976.

Robert Kirvel receives the nomination for his essay, “A Bomb in the Final Essay by Oliver Sacks,” which won the Chautauqua Editors Prize. Kirvel is a Best of the Net nominee for fiction, 2016 winner of the Fulton Prize for the Short Story, and a 2015 ArtPrize winner for creative nonfiction. He has published stories or essays in the UK, New Zealand, and Germany; in translation and anthologies; and in a score of US literary journals, such as Arts & Letters.

George Drew’s poem, “Prayer on the Line of Scrimmage” was first runner-up in the Editors Prize. He is the author of The View from Jackass Hill, 2010 winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize awarded by Texas Review Press, which also published Down & Dirty (2015), and his new and selected, Pastoral Habits, in 2016. His eighth collection, Fancy’s Orphan (Tiger Bark Press), came out in January 2017. He is the winner of the 2014 St. Petersburg Review poetry contest.

Dan Roche was second runner-up with his essay, “Emptying Eddie’s Garage.” Roche has published two memoirs, Great Expectation: A Father’s Diary (Iowa, 2008) and Love’s Labors (Riverhead, 1999), and essays in the North American Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Journal, Under the Sun, Passages North, and other places. He’s been a fellow in nonfiction literature with the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he teaches nonfiction writing, journalism, and photography at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

Elizabeth Burton is nominated for her story, “Creakings.” She is an award-winning fiction writer from Lexington, Kentucky. Her short stories have appeared in Waypoints, Kentucky Review, and Roanoke Review. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Texas (English) and Stony Brook University (linguistics) and is studying fiction in Spalding University’s MFA program.

Johnson Cheu is nominated for his poem, “Mother, Sewing.” His poetry and essays have appeared in Family Matters: Poems of our Families, Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, and Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. He served as the inaugural fiction/poetry editor of Disability Studies Quarterly, and he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University.

Doug Ramspeck is nominated for his poem “Roadside Glass.” He is the author of five poetry collections, and his most recent book, Original Bodies (Southern Indiana Review Press), was selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Two of his earlier books, Mechanical Fireflies and Black Tupelo Country, have also received awards. Individual poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Slate, the Southern Review, and the Georgia Review.

Supported by Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua is produced in partnership with the Department of Creative Writing and the Publishing Laboratory at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Each year a group of graduate and undergraduate students work as members of the editorial team. They read and discuss submissions, fact check and edit, search for art, and participate in the artistic process of building a book. Chautauqua is released each year in June as the Chautauqua Institution’s summer season begins.

Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. Anchored by the historic Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, founded in 1878, Chautauqua’s literary arts programming includes summer-long interaction of published and aspiring writers at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, the intensive workshops of the nationally recognized Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, and lectures by prominent authors on the craft and art of writing. Learn more at chq.org/season/literary-arts.

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Wichita State MFA Faculty in Creative Writing

Wichita State’s MFA Program is proud to feature a strong faculty of award-winning writers who work closely with our students over three years in the program. Our faculty includes:

Albert Goldbarth

A living literary legend, Albert Goldbarth is the author of over thirty collections of poetry, essays, and a novel. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the only poet to twice win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (for Saving Lives (2001) and Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (1991). Featured in almost every poetry magazine of the past several decades, he has appeared many times in Poetry, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the New York Times. His newest books include the poetry collection Selfish (2015) and Adventures in Form and Content (2016), a collection of essays.

Sam Taylor

Part of a new generation of aesthetically diverse poets, Sam Taylor is the author of two books of poems, Body of the World (Ausable/Copper Canyon) and Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry Series). He has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and residency awards from such places as Yaddo, UCross, Djerassi, and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have been published in such publications as AGNI, The New Republic, and The Kenyon Review. He directs the Creative Writing Program, but is on sabbatical in the 2017-18 academic year. His website is www.samtaylor.us.

Margaret Dawe

Margaret Dawe's novel Nissequott was published by New Directions and was critically praised by such publications as The New York Times Book Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in Sonora Review and Antioch Review. She is currently finishing her second novel, Missing Woman, and is also at work on a third book that is set in Wichita. She served for many years as the Chair of the WSU English Department and as the Director of the Creative Writing Program, and she is currently the Interim Director of the Creative Writing Program. In addition to teaching fiction workshops, Dawe occasionally teaches a nonfiction workshop.

And, we plan to hire a new full-time fiction faculty member this year.

+ Visiting Writers

WSU also hosts a rich and diverse series of visiting poets and writers, many of whom stay for month-long residencies in which they offer our students one-on-one tutorials. This year, Yannick Murphy will be our Fiction Writer in Residence in the Fall, and Sandra Beasley will be our Poet in Residence in the Spring.

Other Recent Visiting Writers include: Kim Addonizio Mary Ruefle Lee Clay Johnson Yannick Murphy Robin Coste Lewis (canceled) Cary Holladay Peter Behrens Malena Morling Ed Skoog

And other recent visitors in our reading series have included:

Gregory Orr David Wojahn Lan Samantha Chang Patricia Lockwood Keven Brockmeier Paul Harding

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Please Donate to my GoFundMe

In February 2017, I applied to the Iowa Young Writers Studio and the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. I was, to my great pleasure (and my surprise), accepted. However, due to some sticky financial situations, I can't pay even the reduced tuition for Iowa. These programs lend expert help to aspiring writers, and I hope they might open a door to further writing opportunities — both in college and beyond. Furthermore, I hope that my voice as a queer poet will add to the richness of thought both in the workshops and in poetry at large. By attending these programs, I will be one step closer to realizing my ambitions. Please donate to my GoFundMe campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/get-me-to-writers-conferences