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“I was really interested in the idea of the body as a place of imprisonment but also, the body as a place of liberation.” Olivia Laing speaks about her latest book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Norton, 2021), and how she addresses the themes of illness, sexual violence, and incarceration with imagery and by including historical figures of the past century in this conversation with author Maggie Nelson for the Center for Fiction.
“What do you see when you look at me?” Monster is a film adaptation of the 1999 YA novel of the same name by the late Walter Dean Myers, which tells the story of seventeen-year-old film student Steve Harmon and how his life is altered when he is charged with felony murder. With a screenplay written by Radha Blank, Cole Wiley, and Janece Shaffer, the film stars Kelvin Harrison, Jr.; Jennifer Hudson; John David Washington; and Jeffrey Wright.
“I got something out of being a teacher, I had to make things understood, and that put me in the class of poets who wanted to be understood,” says Robert Frost in this rare 1952 interview for NBC with Bela Kornitzer, in which the renowned poet speaks about his childhood, early publishing career, and the development of his craft, and reads two of his poems: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Drumlin Woodchuck.”
In his essay “What My Korean Father Taught Me About Defending Myself in America,” published in GQ, Alexander Chee writes about his father’s adventurous life as a tae kwon do champion and community organizer in Maine, looking back on his father’s life as a way of learning how to protect himself and speak out about racism, and in particular, attacks against Asian Americans. “My father’s advice, about fighting being the last resort, has given me another lesson: You turn yourself into the weapon when you strike someone else—in the end, another way to erase yourself—and so you do that last.” Write an essay about a skill you learned as a child from which you can glean lessons as an adult.
“I write, I free write, I type it in a computer, and then I start over from the beginning and then I add to it.” In this 2017 City of Asylum video, Yona Harvey speaks about her revision process, self-censorship, and the difference processes for writing poems, essays, and comic books. Harvey’s second poetry collection, You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love (Four Way Books, 2020), won the 2020 Believer Book Award in poetry.
Hey mi gente, thanks for joining me for another blog post. As my time as Houston’s literary outreach coordinator comes to a close, I want to get back into all the ways that Houston is making waves.
Let’s talk about the only literary conference created specifically for the emerging writer: the Boldface Conference for Emerging Writers. Hosted by University of Houston’s undergraduate literary magazine Glass Mountain and run by a brilliant set of up-and-coming writers from the university’s Creative Writing Program, Boldface is a conference like no other. The five-day conference includes daily workshops, readings, craft talks, social events, and panels with professionals in the literary field, all specifically designed with the needs of the emerging writer in mind.
What I love most about how their programming works is that the organizers are versatile and thoughtful enough to change it up to meet the needs of the public. Last year, they were able to quickly reorganize and provide a virtual experience called the Strikethrough Workshop. This year, the annual conference will be held virtually from May 24 to May 28 and features craft talks with Melissa Febos, Diana Goetsch, Donika Kelly, and Ito Romo. Visit the website for the Boldface conference to find out more and to register for the events.
I also want to give a big congrats to local educator and poet Kim-Ling Sun who was awarded a United States of Writing Project Grant for her upcoming project “Celebrate and Stop the Hate.”
Sun, along with writer Addie Tsai, have created a two-part writing workshop series for BIPOC teens to celebrate heritage and work towards unity between communities. In the first workshop, teens will learn about different poetic forms and work on generative poetry. In the second workshop, teens will all present their works as part of a community reading. The workshops are free and will be held on Saturday, May 22 and Saturday, May 29, from 1:00–2:00 PM CDT. Those interested can sign up for the workshop here.
In addition, a reading featuring Sun and Tsai, along with Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman and Min Kang, will be held live at Social Beer Garden HTX and live-streamed via Facebook on June 5 starting at 4:00 PM CDT. The “Celebrate and Stop the Hate” AAPI reading will also include a charity raffle, food trucks, and lion dance performances.
And, a major shout-out to Joshua Nguyen who won the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry for his first full-length collection, Come Clean, forthcoming in the fall from University of Wisconsin Press.
Lastly, I am so excited to share that I have been named the 2022 Texas poet laureate by the Texas Commission on the Arts! I have plans and can’t wait to celebrate with everyone.
Lupe Mendez is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Houston. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @houstonpworg.“So, what comes after irony? For me, it’s wonder and horror, magic and sorrow,” writes Brenda Peynado in her essay “Is Fabulism the New Sincerity?” published on Literary Hub. In the essay, Peynado describes how she grew up in an era when irony and sarcasm were default ways to express oneself and how her writing turned to fabulism, a change prompted by a desire to “save realities from erasure” and inspired by writers such as Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison, as well as more contemporary writers such as Carmen Maria Machado, Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah, and Te-Ping Chen. Write a short story inspired by fabulism that relies on “wild conceits” to express a truth and offer social critique, such as Peynado’s short story which includes angels appearing after a school shooting.
“She seems a part of me, / and then she seems entirely like what she is: / a white dog, / less white suddenly, against the snow,” writes Carl Phillips, recipient of the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize, in his poem “White Dog” from his collection The Rest of Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). In the poem, the speaker recounts walking their dog during the first snow of the year and realizing through their relationship the limits of love and loss. Inspired by Phillips, write a poem featuring a beloved pet of yours or an animal you’ve befriended in which you learn something new.
“The orchard was on fire, but that didn’t stop him from slowly / walking / straight into it, shirtless,” reads Carl Phillips from his poem “Dirt Being Dirt” in this video produced by Washington University in St. Louis where he is a professor. Phillips, author of fifteen books of poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), is the recipient of the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize.
In this reading presented by the Kenyon Review, Shira Erlichman, Ross Gay, and Saeed Jones read poetry and present interdisciplinary work, as well as discuss their inspirations and writing processes in a discussion with the magazine’s editor Nicole Terez Dutton.
