Carolyn Parkhurst
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In this book trailer for Carolyn Parkhurst's novel The Nobodies Album, recently published in paperback by Anchor Books, the author introduces The Carolyn Parkhurst Collection.
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Genre: Fiction
James Franco and Paul Mariani
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Earlier this year actor James Franco and biographer Paul Mariani fielded questions at the Boston College premiere of The Broken Tower, a film directed by and starring Franco, based on Mariani's 1999 biography, The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane.
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Kelly Norman Ellis on Chicago's South Side
Poet Kelly Norman Ellis, author of Tougaloo Blues and longtime P&W-supported writer and presenter of literary events, dotes on Chicago's South Side and the Neighborhood Writing Alliance.
I’ve lived and worked on Chicago’s South Side for almost thirteen years. As an educator and writer, I am attracted to organizations that express a commitment to writing and art outside the academic community. Our writing program at Chicago State seeks to coalition build with community organizations so that our students realize the benefits and necessity of teaching outside of the academy.
The Neighborhood Writing Alliance (NWA) located on the South Side of Chicago fills this need. NWA runs writing workshops for adults in low-income neighborhoods throughout Chicago, and publishes selected pieces from those workshops in its quarterly award-winning publication, Journal of Ordinary Thought (JOT). Founded in 1996 by Hal Adams, Deborah Epstein, and Sunny Fischer, NWA grew out of JOT, which was founded by Hal Adams in 1991.
Hundreds of Chicago adults have participated in NWA writing groups in a range of settings—from public libraries and public schools (where parents participate) to social service agencies and public housing projects. Workshops are conducted across ethnic lines. In one workshop, I taught African Americans born in Chicago, Mississippi, and Jamaica; Polish immigrants; fourth generation Irish Americans and second generation Mexican Americans. Participants in these workshops write primarily from their own experience, but through writing and discussion make connections between their personal experiences and broader social issues.
Workshop leaders are Chicago-based professional writers and arts educators such as Krista Franklin, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Parneshia Jones, Tony Lindsay, Carlos Flores, and Valerie Wallace, to name a few. NWA also has an impressive Writer’s Advisory Council, which includes Achy Obejas, Alex Kotlowitz, television journalist Bill Kurtis. The legendary Studs Turkel also served on the council before his death.
Our MFA program at Chicago State believes in the connection of writing and social justice. NWA demonstrates this principal at work by providing internships to our writing students on the graduate and undergraduate level, allowing them to experience the successful marriage of art and activism.
Photo: Kelly Norman Ellis. Credit: Natasha Marin.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Chicago is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Black Lawrence Press Offers Early Entry Fee For Book Award
Poetry and prose publisher Black Lawrence Press is accepting entries to its multi-genre book contest, with a special deal for writers who submit before June 30.
Entry to the St. Lawrence Book Award competition, open to both poetry and short story manuscripts, is fifteen dollars (reduced from twenty-five) until next Thursday. (The press offered a similar promotion last year for another of its prizes, with a choose-your-own-entry-fee model.)
The book prize offers one thousand dollars and ten copies of the published book. The deadline for entry is August 31, and finalists will be announced in October, followed shortly thereafter by the winner selection.
Past winners for poetry include Katie Umans for Flock Book, Brad Ricca for American Mastodon, Jason Tandon for Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, and Stefi Weisburd for The Wind Up Gods. For fiction, Yelizaveta P. Renfro won for A Catalogue of Everything in the World: Nebraska Stories, Fred McGavran for The Butterfly Collector, and Marcel Jolley for Neither Here Nor There.
More details on the prize history and how to enter online are available on the press's website.
Book Fresheners
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This ad campaign, developed by the Voskhod ad agency for the bookstore 100,000 Books in Yekaterinburg, Russia, recently won an award at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity .
D.C. Writer Wins Book Prize for Stories Tackling Race, Womanhood, and Otherness
The Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey, has announced the winner of the 2011 Paterson Fiction Prize, given annually for a novel or short story collection. Danielle Evans won the one-thousand-dollar prize for her short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead Books), which earlier this year was longlisted for the Story Prize and given an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award.
Evans's debut book takes its title from "The Bridge Poem" by Kate Rushin (The Black Back-Ups, Firebrand Books, 1993), whose meditation on the phenomenon of one group's "translating" their lives for the benefit of another group influenced the themes of Your Own Fool Self. "Right now we have a moment with a lot of language about post-racialism and yet a lot of evidence that we are clearly not post-anything," Evans told the Washington Post, "and there's a lot of room for complication, contradiction, and ambiguity, which is good territory for fiction."
Evans received the prize over fellow Iowa Writers' Workshop alumna (and current Workshop director) Lan Samantha Chang's All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (W. W. Norton), Deborah Eisenberg's The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador), Patricia Engel's Vida (Black Cat), Lily King's Father of the Rain (Atlantic Monthly Press), Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Riverhead Books), and Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
In the video below, novelist Tayari Jones praises Evans's book. (And in the video here, the Washington Post's video book reviewer Ron Charles—who recently won an award of his own—takes on Evans's collection.)
June 23
Track down what's referred to as "the Flitcraft parable" or "the Falling Beams story" in Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon. Read it first as a period piece, but then try to bring it closer to your world. Focus on that devastating final line of the story, "He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling." Read that sentence over and over again, and allow yourself to feel the promise and the terror contained within the sentence—the promise of change, the terror of sameness. Now begin a story using that sentence and see where it leads you.
This week's fiction prompt comes from Siddhartha Deb, author of the novels The Point of Return (HarperCollins, 2002) andAn Outline of the Republic (Ecco, 2005). His book of nonfiction, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, will be published in August by Faber and Faber.
Turkeys Attack Author
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Watch this footage of wild turkeys attacking Michigan author Bonnie Jo Campbell, whose new novel, Once Upon a River, will be published next month by W. W. Norton. Then read Kevin Nance's profile of Campbell in the July/August issue.
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Arthur Conan Doyle
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In this rare footage, filmed just weeks before his death on July 7, 1930, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speaks about Sherlock Holmes, the scientific method, fan letters, and his interest in psychic phenomenon.
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Literary Fathers
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From Open Road Media comes this video of Kaylie Jones and Andre Dubus III sharing memories of their dads.
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