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This Motionpoems film, presented by Button Poetry, is an adaptation of Cortney Lamar Charleston’s poem “How Do You Raise a Black Child?” directed by Seyi Peter-Thomas and produced by Station Film, in partnership with Cave Canem. Charleston is the author of the poetry collection, Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017).
Congress proposes increased funding for NEA and NEH; Whiting Award winners announced; a case against prescribing books as therapy; and other news.
“Us brown girls: Brick-built: / Masters of every metaphor and every metamorphosis…” Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X (HarperTeen, 2018), reads her poem “This Is For Us” for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series.
The Whiting Foundation announced the ten recipients of its $50,000 awards at a ceremony tonight in New York City. The annual awards are given to emerging writers of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama.
The winners are Rickey Laurentiis and Tommy Pico in poetry; Anne Boyer in poetry and nonfiction; Patty Yumi Cottrell, Brontez Purnell, and Weike Wang in fiction; Esmé Weijun Wang in nonfiction; and Nathan Alan Davis, Hansol Jung, and Antoinette Nwandu in drama.
“Year on year, we’re astounded by the fresh ways Whiting winners challenge form and stretch the capabilities of language, while scrutinizing what’s most urgent in the culture,” says Courtney Hodell, the Whiting Foundation’s director of writers’ programs. “The award is intended to give them the freedom to keep experimenting and growing.”
Established in 1985, the Whiting Awards have given more than $7.5 million to 330 writers since its inception. Previous winners include poets Tracy K. Smith and Jorie Graham, fiction writers Deborah Eisenberg and Denis Johnson, nonfiction writers Mary Karr and John Jeremiah Sullivan, and playwright Tony Kushner.
Photos clockwise from top left: Rickey Laurentiis, Tommy Pico, Anne Boyer, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Brontez Purnell, Antoinette Nwandu, Hansol Jung, Nathan Alan Davis, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Weike Wang.
Tracy K. Smith on what she’s reading; booksellers defend the University Press of Kentucky; Michael Chabon writes an ode to David Lynch; and other news.
Books by James Comey and John Oliver vie for top spot on Amazon’s best-seller list; finalists for Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award announced; novelist Alex George will open a bookstore in Columbia, Missouri; and other news.
“I own no dog, but I am about to let go of the leash.” Shayla Lawson, author of I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean (Saturnalia Books, 2018), reads her poem “Pantone 427 U” for the Spoken Series at the Pickathon music festival in Portland, Oregon.
In a 2013 interview for the National Book Foundation, poet Lucie Brock-Broido, who passed away earlier this month, spoke of a leather-bound journal she kept with lists of names and titles. “Sometimes, I just place a title at the top of the undisturbed, blank page and that name becomes something like a piece of sand that happened into the delicate flesh of an oyster, blank itself and closed off from the world…. The result, eventually, is a pearl.” Spend several days jotting down phrases and combinations of words you come across, either out in the world or from your imagination, that seem particularly imagistic, evocative, or disquieting. Select one to use as a poem title, and then let a poem build intuitively, layer by layer, around the “disturbance.”
Submissions are currently open for the 2018 Not Otherwise Specified (NOS) Book Contest. A prize of $1,000 and publication by Les Figues Press will be given annually for a book of poetry or prose that “exceeds genre conventions.” Poet Simone White will judge.
Accepted entries include poetry collections, novellas, novels, story collections, essays, hybrid works, and translations. Using the online submission system, submit a manuscript of 64 to 250 pages with a $25 entry fee (which includes a book of choice from the Les Figues catalogue) by April 1.
An imprint of the Los Angeles Review of Books’s LARB Books, Les Figues Press publishes feminist poetry, prose, visual art, and translation. Previous winners of the NOS award include Mariko Nagai for Irradiated Cities and Adam Tipps Weinstein for Some Versions of the Ice. Visit the Les Figues website for more information.
A reading of Rachel Carson’s writing on the sea; the finalists for the $10,000 Four Quartets Poetry Prize; candles inspired by books; and other news.
