Celebrate this year’s 5 Over 50 with readings from the authors and a conversation about their individual paths to publication.
Introducing this year’s 5 Over 50 (clockwise from upper left): Suzette Mullen, author of The Only Way Through Is Out (University of Wisconsin Press); Dorsía Smith Silva, author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry Press); Uchenna Awoke, author of The Liquid Eye of a Moon (Catapult); Parul Kapur, author of Inside the Mirror (University of Nebraska Press); and Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender (Harper).
From the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine: “For the past nine years 5 Over 50 has featured authors who published their debut books later in life, authors who prudently used the fertile soil of their life journeys to produce works of poetry and prose that benefitted from their having moved through what one such writer, Deborah Jackson Taffa, calls the potential ‘callowness of youth’ and into a space of patience, trust, experience, and healing. The following debut authors over the age of fifty share stories of listening to an inner voice urging them to be a writer, having a natural disaster bring them back to poetry, falling asleep with a pen in hand every night, honoring and exploring their inner child to the fullest, and coming back to the radiant energy of a manuscript shelved for years. ‘This is the point where you feel assured to bet on yourself,’ Dorsía Smith Silva affirms.”