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In this video the Associated Press offers a summary of yesterday's announcement that the Justice Department is suing five major publishers and on price-fixing charges. HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster settled the charges Wednesday, leaving Penguin, Macmillan, and Apple in what could be a protracted legal fight.
This video installation by Maria Korporal, featuring a poem by Daìta Martinez, is part of the collective show ANIMA-L-ARTE at Rome's Monte Soratte nature museum.
In partnership with the family of a Vietnam veteran known for his antiwar writing and activism, Iowa Review has launched a multigenre writing contest open to U.S. military veterans and active duty personnel. The Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award competition, which offers one thousand dollars and publication in Iowa Review, is accepting entries of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on any subject.
Pulitzer Prize winner and Vietnam veteran Robert Olen Butler will select the winning work from a pool chosen by the journal's editors (all finalists will be considered for publication). Butler, much of whose work is informed by his experiences in the U.S. military, served in Vietnam as an intelligence agent and a translator. He is the author of twelve novels, most recently A Small Hotel (Grove Press, 2011), six short story collections, and a nonfiction book on craft, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction (Grove Press, 2005).
Writers may submit their work with a fifteen-dollar entry fee via Submittable or postal mail (an extra ten dollars gets entrants a yearlong subscription to the magazine). The deadline is June 15. Visit the Iowa Review website for complete guidelines.
In the video below, Butler discusses how his time in the military led the former playwright to fiction, and how his experiences in Vietnam have shaped his work.
This video, for Mark Strand's "The Poem of the Spanish Poet," was filmed in the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s New York City apartment and features animation by director and animation artist Juan Delcan.
The associate art director at Knopf, who has designed covers of books by Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, and many others (as well as an issue of Poets & Writers Magazine), gave a hilarious talk at a recent TED conference. Check it out.
In collaboration with Miami Dade College, the thirty-four-year-old National Poetry Series has established a new book award to accompany its five annual prizes, for a collection of Spanish-language verse.
The winner of the inaugural Paz Prize for Poetry will receive five hundred dollars, and Akashic Books will publish the winning book in a bilingual edition.
The competition, open to American poets writing in Spanish, will begin accepting manuscript entries on May 1 and will close on June 15. Finalists will be announced in July, and a winner, selected by Puerto Rican American poet Victor Hernández Cruz, will be named in September.
"In our increasingly diverse nation, poetry in translation is not just desired, but necessary," says Alina Interian, executive director of Miami Dade College's literary hub, the Center, in a press release. "It allows for shared experience across cultures and greater understanding, and for even more beauty in our world."
Complete guidelines for the Paz Prize are available on the National Poetry Series website.
Trio House Press, a new poetry outfit in Staten Island, New York, is accepting entries for two book awards. The prize for a first or second poetry collection, judged by Ross Gay, will award publication and one thousand dollars. A second one-thousand-dollar award, judged by Michael Waters, will grant publication of a manuscript by a poet in any stage of her career.
In addition to publication and the monetary prize, the press will also offer winners a role behind the scenes at Trio House. The press has adopted a cooperative structure, so winners will become part of publishing operations for a twenty-four month period (similar to the model employed by, for example, Alice James Books and Calypso Editions) and be involved, each joining one of four committees, in the publication of subsequent books. (Trio House plans to release three titles a year.)
This year's judge in emerging poetry, Gay is the author of two collections, Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) and Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006). He is a Cave Canem fellow and a professor at Indiana University and Drew University's low-residency MFA program.
General prize judge Waters, also a teacher in Drew University's program (as well as a professor at Monmouth University in his home state of New Jersey), is author of ten collections, most recently Gospel Night (BOA Editions, 2011). He is also coeditor of the most recent edition of Contemporary American Poetry, published in 2006 by Houghton Mifflin.
For both of Trio House's competitions, poets residing in the United States may submit manuscripts of forty-eight to seventy pages with an entry fee of twenty-five dollars by April 30. Entries are accepted via Submittable (formerly Submishmash).
In the video below, Gay recites a poem at the Page Meets Stage reading series in New York City.
Look through your poem drafts, notes, and writing fragments. Choose one line that you like and refine it until it feels as complete and polished as one line out of context can be. Use that line as a refrain in a new poem. When you've completed a decent draft, try writing an additional draft of the poem without the line, using it instead as the title.
In honor of National Poetry Month, commit to memorizing one poem a week during April. Allow the experience of inhabiting each poem in this way feed your own poetry.
For National Poetry Month, California-based DIESEL bookstore is posting a video poem a day. Today's: Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse" read by Anna Kaufman.
