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“Soundless, it crosses a line, quiets into a seed / & then whatever makes a seed. almost like gone / but not gone. the air kept its shape.” At the 2019 Lambda Literary Retreat, Danez Smith reads “undetectable” and “say it with your whole black mouth” from their third poetry collection, Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The Poison Pen Reading Series holds events in a bar called the Poison Girl Cocktail Lounge. The series has been going for twelve years, just a little longer than Houston VIP Slam (which I featured last week), but functions in a very different way. The series brings three writers together who read on the outside patio of the lounge. Audience members get to relax in a space under the stars and listen to literary works from writers from Houston and beyond.
The readings are usually hosted by Scott Repass, one of the owners of the lounge, and start at 8:00 PM on every third Thursday of the month. The featured readers vary for each event, but most times, audience members will get the opportunity to hear from at least one writer from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, a writer from the Houston literary community, and a visiting writer from outside of Houston. Writers share work from all genres including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
I have been to many Poison Pen readings and have had the pleasure of being a featured reader, the last time was this past July when I was honored to share the stage with poet Natasha Carrizosa and fiction writer Robert Liddell. The readings are always jam-packed, standing room only in most cases, so if you plan to attend, get there early for a drink and to find a good seat for the reading. It’s worth it.
The Poison Pen Reading Series at Poison Girl in Houston. Lupe Mendez is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Houston. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @houstonpworg.“We like to think about people and nature as two separate things,” says Richard Powers speaking about his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Overstory (Norton, 2018), in this PBS NewsHour interview. “This book is precisely a book that challenges that notion of human separatism.” For more Powers, read “A Talk in the Woods: Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Powers” from the November/December 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I would LOVE to imagine / being alive in five / years but I have these bones u know? / and just like that I’m writing / a poem / a poem / a poem / again.” In this 2018 video from the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, Tommy Pico reads an excerpt from Feed (Tin House Books, 2019), the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy of book-length poems.
“Elephant on an orange line, underneath a yellow circle / meaning sun. / 6 green, vertical lines, with color all from the top / meaning flowers.” In this animated short film for the TED-Ed “There’s a Poem for That” series, Aracelis Girmay reads her poem “For Estefani Lora, Third Grade, Who Made Me a Card” from her collection Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007).
“It’s a story of a young girl who comes to America in the early 1980s and, among many other things, discovers something called race,” says Sharmila Sen about her debut memoir, Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America (Penguin Books, 2018), which won the 2019 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in nonfiction.
Submissions are currently open for Columbia Journal’s 2019 Winter Contest, which features awards for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. One winner in each genre will receive a $1,000 cash prize and publication in Columbia Journal in spring 2020. At least two runners-up will also be selected and announced for each category.
Using only the online submission system, submit a cover letter and up to five poems totaling no more than five pages or a piece of prose of up to 5,000 words with a $15 entry fee by December 15. Ruth Madievsky, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Ada Calhoun will judge for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, respectively. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
Founded in 1977, Columbia Journal is edited by students in the Columbia University School of the Arts MFA program. The journal, which publishes a print edition every spring and online content throughout the year, seeks to “showcase the best poetry, nonfiction, fiction, translation, and visual art.” Previous issues have featured Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sharon Olds, among others.
“Child, we move through graves / like eels, delicious with our heads first, our mouths / agape.” In this Ours Poetica video, Jane Wong reads her poem “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly” published in the November 2018 issue of Poetry magazine. Wong’s second poetry collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2021.
