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A prize of $1,000; publication by O, Miami Books; and 10 author copies is given annually for a poetry chapbook by a Black poet.
The Washington Island Literary Festival, sponsored by Write On, Door County, was held from September 19 to September 21 at the Trueblood Performing Arts Center and other venues in Washington Island, Wisconsin. The festival featured workshops, panel discussions, author presentations, and a community creative lab for poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers.
Washington Island Literary Festival, Write On, Door County, P.O. Box 457, Fish Creek, WI 54212. (920) 868-1457. Jerod Santek, Founding and Artistic Director.
William Carlos Williams’s multi-volume, mid-twentieth-century poem Paterson is purportedly inspired by the works of his contemporaries: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Through his subject—the former mill town of Paterson, New Jersey—Williams provides a voice for American industrial communities. A launching pad for other artists’ work, the book inspired Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson, about a bus driver and poet named Paterson in the city of the same name, and Robert Fitterman’s book Creve Coeur (Winter Editions, 2024), set in the segregated suburbs of his eponymous Missouri hometown—an illustration of contemporary America that mirrors the structure of Williams’s postwar epic. Write a poem that draws on specific observations of your neighborhood to express a wider perspective on life in the twenty-first century. Incorporate street names, local landmarks, and history as well as tidbits of everyday conversation.
In this installment of the Visions of America: All Stories, All People, All Places series hosted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and PBS Books, Kaoukab Chebaro, head of Global Studies at the Columbia University Libraries, discusses the importance of first-person storytelling and her work in preserving the individual history of Arabs across the globe.
