Poets & Writers Blogs

Think about a choice you made in your life that led to specific consequences or outcomes. Explore the alternative reality that could have been if you'd made a different choice in an essay that begins If I hadn't...

Look out your window or observe your surroundings and make a list of ten images. Choose the three that you find most compelling and freewrite about them, exploring any memories or associations they elicit. Put your freewriting exercise aside, and draft a poem that incorporates at least five of the images from your list. 

The finalists for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced today. Of the thirty finalists, one winner in each of the six categories will be selected this February to receive the prestigious literary prize. 

The finalists in poetry are David Ferry for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press), Lucia Perillo for On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press), Allan Peterson for Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s Books), D. A. Powell for Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press), and A. E. Stallings for Olives (Triquarterly).

The finalists in fiction are Laurent Binet for HHhH, translated by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Ben Fountain for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco), Adam Johnson for The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House), Lydia Millet for Magnificence (W. W. Norton), and Zadie Smith for NW (Penguin Press).

The finalists in autobiography are Reyna Grande for The Distance Between Us (Atria Books), Maureen N. McLane for My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the late Anthony Shadid for House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Leanne Shapton for Swimming Studies (Blue Rider Press), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for In the House of the Interpreter (Pantheon).

For a complete list of finalists, including those in the additional categories of general nonfiction, biography, and criticism, and for profiles of each author, visit the National Book Critics Circle Tumblr page or the official blog of the NBCC, Critical Mass.

The National Book Critics Circle Awards—the only national prizes selected by a panel of established literary critics—have been given annually since 1976 for books published in the United States in the previous year. The NBCC also honors one of its member critics with the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and awards the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award for a distinguished author, editor, publisher, or literary institution, each year.

The winners of the 2012 awards will be announced on Thursday, February 28 at a ceremony at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City. A finalists reading will be held on February 27. 

The Hong Kong-based Man Asian Literary Prize has announced the shortlist for its 2012 prize. Of the five finalists, culled from an original long list of fifteen, one winner will receive an award of thirty thousand dollars.  

The shortlisted finalists include: Musharraf Ali Farooqi of Pakistan for Between Clay and Dust (Aleph), Hiromi Kawakami of Japan for The Briefcase (Counterpoint Press), Orhan Pamuk of Turkey for Silent House (Knopf), Tan Twan Eng of Malaysia for The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books), and Jeet Thayil of India for Narcopolis (Faber and Faber).

The chair of judges, international journalist and cultural critic Maya Jaggi, selected the shortlist along with her fellow judges, Vietnamese American novelist Monique Truong and Indian novelist Vikram Chandra. The winner will be announced on March 14 at the prize ceremony in Hong Kong.

The international award is given annually for a novel by an Asian writer, written in or translated into English and published during the previous year. For more information, visit the Man Asian Literary Prize online.

In the video below, David Parker, executive director of the prize, announces the shortlist, and Maya Jaggi is interviewed about the final five selections.

Ken Waldman has six full-length poetry collections, a children's book of Alaska-set acrostic poems, and a memoir about his work as a touring artist. His nine CDs combine old-time Appalachian-style string-band music with original poetry. A former college professor with an MFA in creative writing, he's made his living as a freelance writer, musician, performer, and educator since 1995.

This past November, Burlingham Books in rural Perry, New York, sponsored a Poets & Writers workshop and reading. At 5:30 on a chilly Tuesday evening, eleven of us gathered around a makeshift table in a corner of the bookstore. For ninety-minutes, we discussed our writing lives amidst four writing exercises. At 7:00 PM, I walked to another corner of the store, this time to stand before approximately thirty-five people, one of whom I'd learned was a local fiddler and violinmaker. To begin, I took out my fiddle, played a tune, then went into one of my collections and found a sonnet, The Violinmakers. After nodding to my new acquaintance, I shared the poem I'd written about his craft.

The fifty-minute reading was followed by a short question-and-answer session. All this was fine, but what made this event more special is that it enabled me to spend the following day at Letchworth Central High School, where I led a short assembly for 350 students, faculty, and staffers, then visited seven English classes. The daylong school visit, which was funded separately, would not have happened without the support of Burlingham Books and Poets & Writers.

What's instructive is explaining how the Perry bookstore event came to be.

Six months earlier I'd been invited by The Stage, a theatre in neighboring Warsaw, New York, for a Poets & Writers workshop and reading. Ahead of schedule that Sunday afternoon, I'd detoured through Perry specifically to stop in Burlingham Books, where I happened to meet a part-time employee, Melissa Stroud, an English teacher at a nearby high school. Before leaving the store, I gave Melissa a few of my books and CDs, as well as several sheets explaining my work in schools.

Later that month, when a library in Geneseo, in adjacent Livingston County, also secured Poets & Writers funding to host me, Melissa attended both the workshop and the reading. Subsequently, it was through her efforts that I was invited to Burlingham Books, and to her school, where I understood it had been five years since a visiting artist of any kind had come, and a longer time since a practicing, published writer had appeared. In this case, I not only stood answering questions in front of classes that had been reading my poems as preparation for my visit, but when I shared poems before the whole school, the assemblage included the high school principal and the school district superintendent.

One more thing about the Perry appearance. It was heartening that among the attendees of both the workshop and readings were folks who'd previously seen me in Warsaw. So, while I expect to return to the region in 2013, it's also my understanding that it won't be such a long time before another writer comes to Letchworth Central High School, perhaps again in conjunction with a Poets & Writers event.

Photo: Ken Waldman.  Photo Credit: Kate Wool.

Support for Readings/Workshops in New York is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

The Minneapolis-based publisher Milkweed Editions is currently accepting submissions for the second annual Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. The prize, open to poets who live in the upper Midwest, offers an award of $10,000 and publication for a poetry collection. The deadline is January 31.

Poets who currently reside in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, or Wisconsin are eligible to submit a previously unpublished, book-length poetry manuscript by postal mail. There is no entry fee. Five finalists will be selected by the editors of Milkweed Editions, and the winner will be chosen by this year’s judge, poet G. C. Waldrep, whose most recent book is Archicembalo (Tupelo Press, 2009). Visit the Milkweed website for complete eligibility and submissions guidelines.

Founded in 1980, Milkweed Editions is an independent press whose mission is to “identify, nurture, and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.” The partnership between Milkweed Editions and the Minneapolis-based law offices of Lindquist & Vennum “celebrates poets for their artistic contributions, and brings outstanding regional writers to a national stage.” 

The inaugural Lindquist & Vennum Prize, judged by poet Peter Campion (The Lions, University of Chicago Press, 2009), was awarded in 2012 to Patricia Kirkpatrick of St. Paul for her collection Odessa. To hear Kirkpatrick read three poems from her winning collection, published this past December by Milkweed Editions, visit our podcast page or click on the Soundcloud player below. 

PW-funded poet Camille Dungy blogs about the daily life of writers and the role Poets & Writers' Readings/Workshops program plays in that life. Dungy is a professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She has published three collections of poetry—Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize; Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press); and What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press).

If you are reading this post you may be interested in understanding more about the life of the writer. What is it we do all day?

I'll tell you: We answer questions.

That's about all we do. We see something and we ask a question about it, and then we write towards our best answer to that question. Or, someone asks us a question, and we don't know the answer right away, and we write toward our best answer. Or we get angry, or sad, or irrationally happy, and we want to work our way away from or back into that emotion. Did JFK really love Jackie? What color would you say is prominent in that sunset? Why don't they understand climate change isn't a joke? We wouldn't be writers if we didn't live with a stockpile of questions awaiting our response. What was she thinking when she drove away from that job? What was she thinking when she drove into the valley. What was she thinking? What?

The Poets & Writers Readings/Workshops program is all about helping writers. When P&W co-sponsors a program, community arts organizations kick in a portion of a reader's fee and then P&W matches that sum. Have you ever wondered what was in those white envelopes people hand to workshop facilitators at the end of a seminar? I'm telling you the secret now: At the end of every Poets & Writers co-sponsored program, writers receive a check stapled to a questionnaire printed on salmon-colored paper and an envelope in which to return the questionnaire. P&W asks writers a slew of questions, and they encourage them to write their answers down.

Questions, questions, questions. These are what we writers dream of all day.

The front side of the questionnaire is easy. Did you get paid? How many people attended the event? Your audience was made up of people representing what ages, ethnicities, etc.? Were your books sold? Was the publicity acceptable? Would you work with these people again? One-word answers can suffice: yes, 5049, mixed, yes, yes, yes. There is no room for elaboration on that first page.

But that's one of the most important things writers do all day, we have to develop elaborate answers. Writers read more into the world than is immediately evident. Vanilla ice cream only has to be plain if you do not push yourself to taste the nuances of the vanilla bean, the variations in the consistency of the cream, to feel the coldness on your inner cheek, and conceptualize the heat transference that made the bite you just took melt over your tongue. Do I like vanilla ice cream? Yes, I could write. Or I could write much, much more.

So, it's generous that Poets & Writers, as part of their mission to support writers, provides a second page on their questionnaire with a series of complicated questions requiring elaboration: Describe the event, including the event program and the audience response. How effective was the sponsoring organization in presenting this event? Are there ways the organization could better assist readers or workshop teachers? What was the impact of receiving support from Poets & Writers on your experience of this event, your career as a writer, your relationship with your audience, etc?

If I could figure out really good answers to these questions, I could write a whole book.

That's what we do all day as writers. We ask ourselves, how am I going to write a whole book? Then we go looking for answers.

Photo: Camille Dungy.  Photo credit: Marcia Wilson/Wide Vision Photography.

Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.