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This trailer for Rachel Cantor's debut novel, A Highly Unlikely Scenario: Or, A Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World, published in January by Melville House, features illustrations and animation by Claire Kelley and Paul Bommer and music by Jerome Kitke's Mad Coyote Madly Sings (Peer International Corp). Listen to an excerpt of the book, read by the author, on our Poets & Writers podcast.
The Poetry Society of America (PSA) has announced that poet Gerald Stern will receive the 2014 Frost Medal, the organization’s most prestigious award, given annually for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry.
The son of immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, Gerald Stern was born in 1925 in Pittsburgh. He is the author of eighteen books of poetry, including most recently In Beauty Bright (Norton, 2012), as well as two chapbooks and four essay collections. His collection This Time: New and Selected Poems, received the National Book Award in 1998, and in 2000 he was appointed the first poet laureate of New Jersey. Among numerous other accolades, he has also received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He studied at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University, and has taught literature and creative writing at Temple University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Drew University, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.
Stern will be honored, along with the recipients of PSA’s annual Shelley Award, Chapbook Fellowships, and a number of other annual poetry awards, at a ceremony on April 9 in New York City. Admission is free and open to the public.
Previous Frost Medal winners have included Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Moore, Marilyn Nelson, Charles Simic, and Wallace Stevens.
In the video below, Gerald Stern reads his poem “The Dancing” for Public Television’s Poetry Everywhere series.
In response to anti-gay legislation in Nigeria, celebrated Kenyan memoirist Binyavanga Wainaina announced he is gay; Amazon will offer retail stores a Kindle-based checkout system; Amanda Bullock lists twenty-nine books every person should read before marrying; and other news.
Start with a quotation that stirs you. It can be a passage from a book, a line from a letter, or a statistic from a newspaper. Use this as a springboard for the rest of your writing this week. Do you agree with the quotation? What role does it play in your life? Do you feel indignation at the statistic? Explore your own opinions and values through the words of another writer, or by confronting the implications of a primary source.
This conversation between acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood and Nobel laureate Alice Munro was streamed live via Google+ Hangout on January 22 to an audience at New York City's Symphony Space as part of the live series Selected Shorts. Despite a few glitches, especially near the beginning, the live stream brought together Munro, who was in Toronto, having been snowed out of New York, and Munro, who was in Vancouver, for a unique exchange.
The New Yorker published an excerpt of Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch; the Telegraph lists several products that use poets to move merchandise, including potato chips; USA Today details why generations of readers still love Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; and other news.
Think of a deceased historical figure and make a list of his or her qualities and attributes. Then try to conjure a modern version of this person in a five-hundred-word story. For instance, a character based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau might be on a walking tour of a city; a character inspired by Marie Curie could be working in a lab. Make this figure your own by weaving in imagined details and context.
"I'm crying, and I've always been crying. It's the only way I know how to gather myself up into a self, to be." The author of the novels Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell In Love With the Moon, In The City Of Shy Hunters, and Now Is the Hour reads from his new book, I Loved You More, forthcoming from Hawthorne Books in April, in this haunting trailer featuring music by Cadens Johnson.
The Poetry Off the Shelf podcast includes a discussion of Apple’s new iPad commercial, which features the poetry of Walt Whitman; Seattle’s city council voted yesterday in support of an UNESCO City of Literature; Peter Schjeldahl talks about the enigmatic William S. Burroughs; and other news.
“The poet is the priest of the invisible,” wrote Wallace Stevens. This week, try to write about an invisible force that affects you deeply. For example, it could be your DNA, music, or the smell of your childhood home. Try to imagine the complexity of the invisible (at least to the naked eye) structure that you are describing. Integrate all of your senses to navigate its visual formlessness.
