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“We’ve become enamored with unreality, and I wanted a work to embody that confusion and also to cut through the noise,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar in this Little, Brown video introducing his forthcoming novel, Homeland Elegies. A Q&A with Akhtar by Amy Gall appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“The glimmer of an idea appears in my notebook long before I begin writing.” —Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters
“When things shut down, I was immediately feeling like what I want to do is make stuff with other people,” says Ross Gay about life during the quarantine in this conversation with artist Arista Alanis for Vermont Studio Center’s Six Feet Apart video series. A Q&A with Aimee Nezhukumatathil by Gay appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
August 29 marks the day the levees broke in New Orleans fifteen years ago. To commemorate the occasion, I am curating a multi-genre reading to remember the lives that were lost and changed by Hurricane Katrina, and the city that was abandoned and continues to thrive. The writers invited for this reading represent the vast stories and experiences of the storm.
The featured readers for our virtual event include:
Lolis Eric Elie, New Orleans native and Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker, who most recently joined the writing staff of the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle and has written for the OWN series Greenleaf and HBO series Treme.
Alison Pelegrin, author of Waterlines (Louisiana State University Press, 2016) and professor in the English department at Southeastern Louisiana University.
Tom Piazza, author of the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters (Harper Perennial, 2008) and a principal writer for the HBO drama series Treme, which explores the aftereffects of Katrina in New Orleans.
Asia Rainey, New Orleans native and veteran artist with a resumé spanning twenty years in spoken word poetry, music, theater, television, visual arts, and film.
Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy, professor of English at Dillard University and author of Second Line Home (Truman State University Press, 2004) and Red Beans & Ricely Yours, which won the 2006 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Prize and the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize in poetry.
José Torres Tama, writer and poet exploring anti-immigrant hysteria in his written work and solo theater show Aliens, Immigrants & Other Evildoers.
We will also have music performed by fourteen-year-old New Orleans saxophonist Akeel Salah Muhammad Haroon.
The reading will be livestreamed on the Poets & Writers Facebook page on Wednesday, August 26 at 6:00 PM CDT. Hope to see you there!
Photo: Flyer for the Fifteenth Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina virtual reading. Kelly Harris is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in New Orleans. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @NOLApworg.
The author of RENDANG blurs the boundary between narrative and lyric.
“The instructor is fairly intelligent and enthusiastic about the material but is unreceptive, even intolerant, of anything that is not a poem or a poem in prose form.” At the 2016 Creative Capital Retreat, Srikanth Reddy reads from his book-length poem Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“There’s a spot over Lake Superior where migrating butterflies veer sharply. No one understood why they made such a quick turn at that specific place until a geologist finally made the connection: a mountain rose out of the water at that exact location thousands of years ago,” writes Aimee Nezhukumatathil about a natural phenomenon that caused a reaction in an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions, 2020), which appears in a Q&A by Ross Gay in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. “Maybe that is the loneliest kind of memory: to be forever altered by an invisible kiss, a reminder of something long gone and crumbled.” What belief, family story, or past event do you feel inexplicably tethered to? Write an essay that draws the connection between your physical reality and the unseen forces behind it.
“I was also writing a story that I wanted to see and that I felt in my own life.” In this Greenlight Bookstore video, Raven Leilani celebrates the launch of her debut novel, Luster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), and speaks about the journey to write the book in this conversation with Samantha Irby. Luster is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
If you are just jumping on to this blog, thank you for coming along for the ride. I have had the pleasure to speak with local Houston writers about how their lives have changed during the pandemic, in particular, how their writing lives have been altered. It has been a difficult time, to say the least, but there have been some new, positive aspects as far as accessibility and inclusion for literary events, and as you’ll see below, family time. For this series, I reached out to writers and posed one simple question:
What have you been doing since the pandemic started?
So far we have heard from Katie Hoerth, Daniel Peña, and Melissa Studdard, and this week I bring you, poet Jonathan Moody.
Jonathan Moody is a Cave Canem alum and received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. His poetry has appeared in African American Review, Borderlands, the Common, Crab Orchard Review, Harvard Review Online, and other publications. He is the author of The Doomy Poems (Six Gallery Press, 2012) and Olympic Butter Gold, which won the 2014 Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. For the upcoming school term, Jonathan will join the English department faculty at South Houston High School. He lives in Pearland, Texas with his wife and three sons.
Here is what Jonathan had to say:
“Before the Coronavirus pandemic, my gruesome teaching schedule didn’t permit me to hydrate as much as I should. I always knew water was essential for the kidneys, but I had no clue that it cushions the brain and the spinal cord. The headaches and lower back pain that caused me distress have now dissipated. I also start each day taking immune boosters: echinacea, elderberry, and Vitamin C. And I’ve stuck to a consistent workout regimen that includes wind sprints and knee taps, as well as calisthenic exercises like push-ups, plyometric push-ups, and chest dips. Now that I’m in much better shape, I’m less complacent when it comes to meal prepping and cooking creative dishes like feijoada, patatas bravas, and flan. One change that I’m most proud of is how Avery Langston, my six-year-old son, demands that I, my wife, and the Moody Twins—Aiden and Aristin—eat dinner together every night as a family.”
Photo: Jonathan Moody (Credit: Thu Nguyen) Lupe Mendez is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Houston. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @houstonpworg.
