Performing the Future: Our Nineteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets
Ten debut poets who published in 2023, including Ina Cariño and Shaina Phenix, share the inspiration, advice, and writers block remedies that form their individual poetics.
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Ten debut poets who published in 2023, including Ina Cariño and Shaina Phenix, share the inspiration, advice, and writers block remedies that form their individual poetics.
A nonprofit founded to strengthen the American South’s reputation as a home for great literature and art, April Gloaming publishes books that push limitations in medium and genre.
The Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, administered by PEN Northwest, offered a seven-month residency from April through October to a poet or prose writer, or pair of writers, at Dutch Henry Homestead in the Rogue River Canyon of southwest Oregon. Residents were provided with private lodging, including two small bedrooms, a sleeping loft, a living room with a kitchen, a bathroom, and a roof-deck, on 92 acres of forest and meadow. One hour of general homestead maintenance was required each day. Residents also received a stipend of at least $3,500.
Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, PEN Northwest, c/o John Daniel, 23030 W. Sheffler Road, Elmira, OR 97437.
An introduction to four new anthologies, including Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically and Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems.
The 47th annual UCR Writers’ Week Festival, sponsored by the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), was held from February 10 to February 16 at the University of California campus in Riverside (UCR) and online. The festival’s programming features author readings and talks, panel discussions, book signings, Q&A sessions, and a Lifetime Achievement Award presentation for poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and translators.
UCR Writers’ Week Festival, University of California in Riverside, Department of Creative Writing, Interdisciplinary North Building 3012, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Director.
The executive director of Kundiman, a national nonprofit supporting Asian American authors, discusses the organization’s evolution over the past twenty years and shares her plans for working in solidarity with other communities of color.
In this virtual reading and conversation, Poets & Writers editor in chief Kevin Larimer introduces the 2023 cohort of “5 Over 50” debut authors, Alma García, author of All That Rises (University of Arizona Press, 2023); Bernardine “Dine” Watson, author of Transplant (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2023); Tommy Archuleta, author of Susto (Center for Literary Publishing, 2023); Chin-Sun Lee, author of Upcountry (Unnamed Press, 2023); and Donna Spruijt-Metz, author of General Release From the Beginning of the World (Parlor Press, 2023).
Love poems have a long and storied literary history. “The Love Song for Shu-Sin,” composed in ancient Mesopotamia for use in fertility rituals, is considered by some to be the oldest love poem found in text form. “Song of Songs” from the Old Testament of the Bible celebrates the romantic and sexual love between two people. In more recent times, poets have been testing the limits of the love poem. Nate Marshall’s “palindrome” imagines an estranged lover’s life rewound like a film as the subject becomes “unpregnant” and the speaker “unlearn[s]” her name. In Sharon Olds’s “The Flurry,” two parents discuss how to tell their children they’re getting a divorce. Think of a relationship in your life that resists easy categorization and write a love poem that attempts to capture this complexity. Whether the subject is the distant love of a parental figure or the one who got away, resist the easy associations that come with the emotion and dive into love’s thorny contradictions.
The author of fox woman get out! explores the connections between poetry and dance.
In this video for the Poets House Hard Hat Reading series, poet and professor Kwame Dawes reads “Acceptance” by his mentor and father Neville Dawes, and his own poem “Sturge Town Redux,” which will appear in his collection Sturge Town, forthcoming from Norton.