HBO to Air Television Miniseries of Ferrante Novels, Bro Books, and More
Black Mountain Institute acquires the Believer; American Prison Writing Archive receives a $262,000 grant; the public versus the private life of the writer; and other news.
Genre: Poetry
Finalists for $10,000 Lindquist & Vennum Prize Announced
Milkweed Editions has announced the finalists for the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. The annual award is given for a poetry collection by a writer residing in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, North Dakota, or South Dakota. The winner receives $10,000 and publication by Milkweed.
The six finalists are The Account of Worms by Angela Voras-Hills, Gatekeeper by Patrick Johnson, Homeboys With Slipped Halos by Michael Torres, Solve for Desire by Caitlin Bailey, To Afar From Afar by Soham Patel, and Wait by Paige Riehl.
The Milkweed editors selected the finalists from a pool of more than two hundred manuscripts; the final judge is poet Srikanth Reddy, who will announce the winner April 19. Visit the Milkweed Editions website to learn more about the finalists.
Cosponsored by the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation and Milkweed Editions, the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry was established in 2011 with the goal of “supporting outstanding poets from the upper Midwest and bringing their work to the national stage.” Previous winners include Chris Santiago, Jennifer Willoughby, Michael Bazzett, Rebecca Dunham, and Patricia Kirkpatrick.
Milkweed Editions is a Minneapolis-based independent publisher of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Photos, clockwise from top left: Patrick Johnson, Soham Patel, Paige Riehl, Angela Voras-Hills, Michael Torres, Caitlyn Bailey.
Nan Talese’s Rise to Success, Litbait, and More
Bob Dylan to finally accept Nobel Prize this weekend; a recently discovered cache of letters from the suffrage movement; Christopher Soto wins Split This Rock’s social justice and poetry award; and other news.
Ode to Gumbo
Caption:
“So why not / make a soup / of what’s left? Why / not boil & chop / something outside / the mind...” Kevin Young reads “Ode to Gumbo” from his poetry collection Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008) at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.
Genre:
Jenny Xie Wins Walt Whitman Award
Poet Jenny Xie has won the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award, the nation’s largest prize for a debut poetry collection. Xie’s manuscript, Eye Level, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2018.
In addition to publication, Xie will receive $5,000 and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranierei Center in Umbria, Italy, and will also be featured on the Academy’s website, poets.org, and in its print periodical, American Poets.
United States Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera selected Xie as this year’s winner. About Eye Level, Herrara writes: “‘Between Hanoi and Sapa’ this collection begins and continues with its ‘frugal mouth’ that ‘spends the only foreign words it owns.’ This knowing ‘travels’ in a spiral-shaped wisdom. We go places; we enter multiple terrains of seeing; we cross cultural borders of time, voices, locations—of consciousness. Then—we notice we are in a trembling stillness with all beings and all things. Jenny Xie’s Eye Level is a timely collection of beauty, clarity, and expansive humanity.”
Jenny Xie holds degrees from Princeton University and New York University’s Creative Writing Program, and has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. She is the author of the chapbook Nowhere to Arrive, which won the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize, and her poems are published or forthcoming in the New Republic, Tin House, Narrative, and elsewhere. Born in Hefei, China, and raised in New Jersey, Xie lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at New York University.
Established in 1975, the Walt Whitman Award is designed to encourage the work of emerging poets. Previous recipients include Suji Kwock Kim, Eric Pankey, Matt Rasmussen, Alberto Ríos, and Mai Der Vang, whose book, Afterland, will be published by Graywolf next month.
AP Style Guide Adds “They” as Singular Pronoun, Writer Automatons, and More
Penguin Random House sales down in 2016; William McPherson has died; fourteen women essayists to read right now; and other news.
Examining Tracy K. Smith’s Solstice
Caption:
In this video, Jia Tolentino, a contributing writer for the New Yorker, examines the poem “Solstice” from Tracy K. Smith’s poetry collection Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011).
Genre:
PEN Literary Awards, Amazon to Adapt The Underground Railroad, and More
Rigoberto González on the life of the poet outside of publications and awards; a survey of literary nonprofits fighting to protect free speech and the arts; the reality-bending writing of Julio Cortázar; and other news.
Ode to Dinner
In his book Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008), poet Kevin Young has a series of odes to particular foods that meditate on memories of the speaker’s father and other family members, such as “Ode to Okra.” Using Young’s poem as inspiration, write an ode to one of your favorite foods that personifies and addresses the dish as “you.” Explore the senses—flavors, smells, sounds, textures, colors—that are stirred from these memories of meals.
Poet Laureate Work: Connecting People to Poetry
Elline Lipkin is the author of The Errant Thread, chosen by Eavan Boland for the Kore Press First Book Award, and Girls’ Studies (Seal Press, 2009). She is the current poet laureate of Altadena, a research affiliate with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, and teaches poetry for Writing Workshops Los Angeles. She blogs about a recent P&W–supported writing workshop with Suzanne Lummis at the Altadena Public Library in Altadena, California.
New to Altadena, and still new as its poet laureate, this past fall I tried to think about what programming would best serve this community—an unincorporated area in Los Angeles County, nestled in the San Gabriel foothills and blending into the borders of Pasadena. I decided a poetry workshop in February would be just the thing to build community and generate interest in poetry in advance of National Poetry Month and other planned literary events. Who might come in to teach enthusiastic poets who write for the joy of expression, the desire to play with words, and the chance to connect with community, I wondered.
Then, as a volunteer with WriteGirl, a Los Angeles-based organization that teaches creative writing to teenage girls, I had the pleasure of witnessing Suzanne Lummis lead a poetry workshop. She was brash, funny, direct, and engaging—all the components that make a great teacher. I knew she would be the perfect person to teach a community workshop at the Altadena Public Library.
The workshop was set up in the Altadena Library community room, which they assured me would be large enough. When I arrived at 12:15 PM to set up for the workshop’s 1:00 PM start, there were already people sitting at the tables. By 12:40 PM someone suggested we look for more chairs and ideally, more tables. By the time the workshop started at 1:05 PM, people were standing in the doorway as I scrambled to make more handouts and the staff set up rows of folding chairs. Close to seventy people crammed into the room.
As I’d hoped, Suzanne again was brash, funny, direct, and engaging. She wedged her way between the closely positioned tables and made certain to talk to people at every corner, all while keeping a current of excitement in the air as she called on participants to respond.
Suzanne’s first exercise was to copy down the phrase, “The judge ran down my list of offenses....” The crowd fell silent, and after a scant eight minutes was ready to share. Suzanne offered on-the-spot critique: “Always stay a step ahead of the reader—don’t go where you think the reader wants you to go.” She emphasized making lines vivid and rich with specificity and moving away from the prosaic.
For another writing exercise, she asked for suggestions she recorded on a whiteboard—names of flavors, fragrances, flowers, and movie stars. The whiteboard was covered with sensory suggestions—chaparral, night-blooming angel’s trumpet, ginger, sassafras, peppermint, and licorice. Helen Mirren, Idris Elba, Barbara Stanwyck, and Marlon Brando mixed in their own column. The assignment was to pick something from each category and “let the words lead you.” “Don’t be literal” was another key piece of advice, alongside, “Keep your writing connected to the sensory and palpable.”
There was barely time to share before the hour and a half was up. A crowd surrounded Suzanne as the event ended. I watched them pour out of the room, buzzing with ideas for their poems, sharing lines and thoughts about the exercises, clearly hungry for the connection poetry brings. I knew I had found the right person for this community, and I was thrilled.
Major support for Readings & Workshops in California is provided by the James Irvine Foundation and the Hearst Foundations. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Photo: Elline Lipkin (Credit: Sylvia Gunde).Pages
