Poets & Writers Blogs

Christopher Soto (aka Loma) is a queer latinx punk poet and prison abolitionist. Originally from Los Angeles, they now live in Brooklyn. Their first chapbook, Sad Girl Poems, is newly released from Sibling Rivalry Press. They have an MFA in poetry from New York University where they studied with Eileen Myles. For more information, visit christophersoto-poet.com.

Following the release of my chapbook, Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), I decided to go on a national tour to end queer youth homelessness. Much of my writing in this initial chapbook discusses my personal relationship to domestic violence, gender tourism, housing instability, etc. I wanted to talk to poetry communities and queer youth across the country about these experiences and about producing poetry in the age of mass incarceration. What does it mean to write about queer youth homelessness while over two million people are incarcerated in the U.S.? What is the historical (and literary) relationship between homeless queer youth and mass incarceration? I wanted to talk about my poems and my histories. I wanted to talk about Vanguard, S.T.A.R. (street transvestite action revolutionaries), The Young Lords, Sylvia Rivera, the Nuyorican Poets Movement, June Jordan, Miguel James, and so on.

Independently, I was able to book events at a handful of universities and organizations. Yet, I was not able to book and venture to smaller organizations which could not afford my travel, accommodation, and reading fees. Artists need to get paid for their labor. We are the thinkers, feelers, culture producers, visionaries in the county! This is where Poets & Writers comes in. At several of my readings in New York City and Chicago, the hosts applied for (and received funding) from Poets & Writers so that I can come speak to their communities. Thank you Poets & Writers! This funding allows me to travel and speak and be paid for the artistic work that I do. I believe that one of the greatest ways to appreciate an artist is to financially support their lives lived as creative people. Currently, the status quo in many literary communities is to underfund artists. Many organizers believe that artists are getting paid with visibility and recognition. These frameworks are false. When artists are not paid it is classist and exploitative (not a privilege). We need to be able to pay for food and rent and living! I am so thankful to Poets & Writers for the funding that they provide to creative people and literary organizations.

I am so thankful for the opportunity to read at all of the universities that have invited me to speak. I remember growing up, and as a teenager listening to spoken word artists feature their work around Southern California venues (such as A Mic and Dim Lights). I wanted so badly to be invited to speak as a feature for someone. I wanted so badly to share my work with the world. Now, years later, I am doing it. I am speaking and writing and traveling and making money from my poems: these little words thrown across the page. My tour dates will be available on my website christophersoto-poet.com and my creative work is also available online for anyone who wants to take a gander. I guess, I will close by saying this: PAY YOUR ARTISTS / END QUEER YOUTH HOMELESSNESS / DEMAND RESPECT FOR YOUR LIFE AND FOR YOUR WORK / YOU DESERVE IT.

Photos: Christopher Soto. Photo credit: Irmand Trujillo

Support for Readings & Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support form the Louis & Anne Abrons Fondation, the Axe-Houghton Fondation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust and Friends of Poets & Writers, as well as by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others.

The University of Georgia Press has announced that poet Christopher Salerno of Caldwell, New Jersey, has won the inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize for his collection Sun & Urn. Salerno will receive a cash award of $1,000 and publication by the University of Georgia Press in February 2017. He will also be invited to read his work at the prize’s sponsoring institutions—the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University—and will receive an additional $1,000, as well as travel expenses, for each reading.
Christopher Salerno is the author of three previous poetry collections: Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2006); Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Press, 2010), which won the 2011 Mississippi Review Award; and ATM (Georgetown Review Press, 2014), which was selected by poet D. A. Powell for the 2014 Georgetown Review Poetry Prize. Salerno currently serves as associate professor in the creative writing and MFA programs at William Paterson University in New Jersey.

Thomas Lux, the final judge of this year’s award, said of Salerno’s manuscript, “Christopher Salerno’s Sun & Urn is a highly accomplished (he has learned his trade!), a madly imaginative, and, ultimately, a brilliant and deeply human book. Read it, please, thrice!”

The Georgia Poetry Prize is a national competition established in 2015 to celebrate poetic excellence. The prize is to be administered annually; submissions for next year’s prize will be accepted from October 1 to November 30. Visit the website for submission guidelines and more information.

The deadline has been extended for the upcoming Pacific Coast/Beyond Baroque Books Award, given for a poetry manuscript by a writer living in California, Oregon, or Washington. The winner will receive $2,000 and publication in the Pacific Coast Poetry Series, an imprint of Beyond Baroque Books. Beyond Baroque editors Suzanne Lummis and Henry Morro will judge.

To apply, submit a manuscript between 48 and 70 pages with a $5 submission fee via postal mail to Pacific Coast Poetry Series, Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Boulevard, Venice, CA  90291, by May 1 (the original deadline was February 15). For more information, visit the website or e-mail Liz Camfiord at liz@beyondbaroque.org.

Beyond Baroque, a literary arts center dedicated to advancing public awareness and involvement in the literary arts, was established in 1968 as an avant-garde poetry magazine of the same name, which published emerging and overlooked writers, particularly from the Los Angeles area. Beyond Baroque Books was launched in 1998, and continues to “unearth cult rarities as well as collections by noted performance poets, educations, and cultural leaders.”

Submissions are currently open for the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, an annual award given for a full-length manuscript by a poet living in the Upper Midwest. The winner receives $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions.
Administered in partnership with Milkweed Editions and the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation, the award was established in 2011 with the goal of celebrating the work of exceptional poets from the Upper Midwest; poets residing in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin are eligible to apply. The editors of Milkweed Editions will select five finalists, and acclaimed poet A. Van Jordan will select the winning manuscript.

To enter, submit one hard copy of an unpublished, book-length collection of poetry, along with a single-page cover sheet that includes contact, submission, and biographical information to: ATTN: Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Open Book, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55415.

The deadline to submit is March 1. There is no entry fee. The winner will be announced in April or May. Visit the website, or call the Milkweed Editions office at (612) 332-3192 for more information.

Milkweed Editions is one of the nation’s leading independent, nonprofit book publishers. Established in 1980, the publisher’s mission is to “identify, nurture, and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.” The press publishes fifteen to twenty titles per year.

Myguail Chappel works in the DeKalb County Public Library's Adult Services department. For over ten years Chappel has coordinated diversity programs including One County, Many Voices; Pub Fiction; International Café; the Jubilee of Reading Book Club Conference; and outreach programs to local nonprofit community organizations in the DeKalb community in Decatur, Georgia. Throughout his tenure, Chappel has leveraged funding from Poets & Writers to develop poetry readings and literary readings that highlight the talents of local and national writers who share in the library’s vision of inclusiveness, diversity, and education to nontraditional library patrons and avid library users.

What makes your program unique?
The DeKalb County Public Library’s annual Jubilee of Reading Book Club Conference is unique because it allows booklovers and book clubs an opportunity to meet national and local award-winning authors in an intimate setting. The format of the conference allows attendees to hear each author discuss their writing, ask questions of the author, take pictures, and receive a personalized signed copy of the author’s work. This one-of-a-kind library event is held annually and with the assistance of Poets & Writers, this past year we were able to leverage resources and invite two nationally known authors Nea Simone and Deborah Johnson.

What recent program have you been especially proud of and why?
With the assistance of funding through Poets & Writers, our annual April Poetry Month program, which honors the works of poets, was a highlight for the DeKalb County Public Library. Poet Theresa Davis performed to poetry enthusiasts. Many attendees expressed they were new to her work, but had seen a listing of the event on the Poets & Writers Literary Events Calendar. This helped to expand the library’s publicity resources and allowed for the poet to gain new followers.

What was your most successful literary program, and why?
The most successful literary event has been the fifteenth Annual Jubilee of Reading Book Club Conference that was held on December 5, 2015. Normally we cap registration at one hundred attendees, but with the assistance of Poets & Writers we were able to accommodate over one hundred and fifty attendees. The energy and reception for the conference was magical. Authors and book lovers e-mailed me after the conference expressing that the event was both informative and fun. Author Deborah Johnson wrote, “I am sending you a proper, written thank you but just wanted to send a quickie now to let you know how honored I was to be asked to participate in the Jubilee of Reading. What a fantastic event—everything so well organized and with such fantastic participants.”

What’s the most memorable thing that’s happened at an event you’ve hosted?
Every event that has been hosted has had memorable moments. The most common theme for me would be seeing the joy that literary and poetry readings bring to the audience and the authors. The written word is sacred and to have that sacredness shared from each individual author’s perspective opens up the diverse world we live and participate in.

How do you cultivate an audience?
DeKalb County Public Library has created a great literary following through programming that we offer throughout the year. At the programs, we ask if attendees would like to be contacted about future events and use this database as a way to advertise, along with publicity through local newspapers, flyers, and Poets & Writers' resources, including the free Literary Events Calendar.

What do you consider to be the value of literary programs for your community?
A value cannot be placed on literary programs. The readings have allowed community participants an outlet to begin sharing their stories: to heal their inner conflicts and place value on their lives. Hosting authors has increased our community value by educating the public and creating a more educated society, gaining new readers, and allowing for diverse groups of people to connect and share their love of reading. The programs also give authors a platform to share their work and expand their audience.

Photo: Author Nea Simone at the Jubilee of Reading Book Club Conference. Photo credit: Angela Ried.

Support for Readings & Workshops events in Atlanta, Georgia is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors, and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Margo Perin is the author of the novel The Opposite of Hollywood (Whoa Nelly Press, 2015) and editor of Only the Dead Can Kill: Stories From Jail (Community Works/West, 2006) and How I Learned to Cook: And Other Writings on Complex Mother-Daughter Relationships (Tarcher/Penguin, 2004). She has taught writing to incarcerated populations, people challenged by life-threatening illnesses, migrants, refugees, elders, and at-risk youth and adults, and has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, O Magazine, and on NPR's "Talk of the Nation." She blogs about a recent P&W-supported writing workshop she conceived and facilitated for San Francisco youth under the auspices of California Poets in the Schools.

In September and October 2015, I embarked on a series of workshops that linked formerly incarcerated and at-risk youth at the Success Center San Francisco with high school students across the street at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (SOTA). I called the project Building Bridges.

The intent of the series was to provide the opportunity for formerly incarcerated and at-risk youth to write about their often invisible life experiences as they develop their creative writing and critical thinking skills, to shed light on their perspectives, and to provide the rare opportunity to foster literary community between young writers of different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. The workshops would not only help build bridges between young writers, but also between Success Center and SOTA staff, and family and community members.

Success Center and SOTA youth each explored and wrote personal narratives through poetry, prose, and spoken word, and read and responded to each others’ personal narratives. In addition, both groups responded to the feedback, creating an ongoing dialogue of understanding.

The workshops culminated with a reading by Success Center youth that was attended by staff, who expressed a deep appreciation and greater understanding of the life stories and literary talents of their students. To further connect the Success Center and SOTA, I facilitated a visit to SOTA by the Success Center Client Service Specialist, who gave a presentation to students and staff on the demographics and struggles that Success Center youth commonly face. It is my hope that the relationship between these institutions will continue and help to reinforce the bridge of understanding and the literary community initiated by the generous funding of Poets & Writers.

This project was extremely enlightening in terms of highlighting the vast difference in economics, education, literacy, feelings of self-worth, social support and validation, and services for youth in the same city and, in this case, for youth attending schools directly across the street from each other. While many of the students at SOTA can expect to continue into higher education and compete for jobs in fields of their choice as they continue to develop as writers, students at the Success Center struggle every day just to attend class to get their GED and improve their literacy.

I am deeply grateful to the sponsoring organization California Poets in the Schools for their generous, honest, and steadfast dedication to their mission as they provide opportunities for youth to find and express their literary voices, and to Poets & Writers for providing the funding to work with the Success Center writers, which would not have been possible otherwise. I am hoping to share what I learned through this project with the reading public, and with other writers and educators to help further "building bridges" between diverse populations.

Photo: Margo Perin.  Photo credit: Marci Klane.

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

Fiction writer Ann Pancake has received the inaugural Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship. As part of the fellowship, Pancake will spend several weeks in residence at the Ala Kukui retreat in Hana, Hawaii. She will also participate in outreach events and present a public talk on the contemporary writer’s social responsibility at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu.

Sponsored by the Manoa Foundation of Honolulu, the annual fellowship was established by Frank Stewart and Debra Gwartney to honor the seventieth birthday of acclaimed writer and naturalist Barry Lopez, who is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the short story collection Outside (Trinity University Press, 2014). The fellowship is given to a writer whose work “contributes to an awareness of the civic and ethical obligation of artists; that helps us understand, through storytelling, that the survival of a human world depends upon a commitment to integrity, empathy, and compassionate reconciliation; and inspires us to take social responsibility for the perils, which we have created ourselves, to the human and non-human world.”

Fellows are nominated and chosen by a committee of editors and writers. This year’s judges were Barry Lopez, Debra Gwartney, Jane Hirshfield, Pico Iyer, and Frank Stewart.

Ann Pancake has written several novels and short story collections, most recently Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (Counterpoint Press, 2015). She lives in Seattle and teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Watch Barry Lopez give a keynote address at Poets & Writers Live in Portland, Oregon, last fall.