The 2019 Gathering of Poets | Faculty & Save the Date

July 10, 2018 By in Announcement, Gathering of Poets, Poetry, Writers' Workshop Tags: , , ,

We are beyond thrilled to share the incredible award-winning faculty for the 2019 Gathering of Poets, to be held on March 30 in Winston-Salem, NC at The Historic Brookstown Inn.

If you would like to attend, send me a note, or visit Jacar Press’ Gathering page, on Facebook, or e-mail Richard for upcoming announcements and how to reserve your space.

Three-time National Book Award finalist, Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of seventeen poetry books and the memoir How I Discovered Poetry. She is also the author of The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems, which won the 1998 Poets’ Prize, Carver: A Life In Poems, which won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and Fortune’s Bones, which was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. Nelson’s honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Frost Medal, and two Pushcart Prizes. She was the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.

 

Li-Young Lee is the author of five critically acclaimed books of poetry, most recently The Undressing (W.W Norton), Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton), and a chapbook The Word From His Song (BOA Editions). His earlier collections are Book of My Nights (BOA Editions); Rose (BOA), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; The City in Which I Love You (BOA), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster), which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and will be reissued by BOA Editions. Lee’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 1988 he received the Writer’s Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. He is also featured in Katja Esson’s documentary, Poetry of Resistance.

 

Lynn Melnick‘s work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, etc. She has edited an anthology for Viking on 100 Poets for the Next Generation, and published two books with YesYes Books, Landscape with Sex and Violence and If I Should Say I Have Hope – to give you an idea of what that means to us, Jacar Press made donations to YesYes Books, and Alice James Book, because we so value the work they’re publishing.

Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y, and works with saferLIT. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.


Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet from Northwest Donegal, Ireland. Her debut collection Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the Shine Strong Award for best first collection in Ireland and for the 2018 Julie Suk Award in the U.S.A. She is the author of a suite of poems about Dublin titled Town (The Salvage Press, 2018). In 2016 Ní Churreáin was the recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award from President Michael D. Higgins on behalf of the Arts Council of Ireland. She was the 2017-18 Kerry Writer In Residence and is the 2018-19 John Broderick Writer In Residence for Westmeath. Ní Churreáin has been awarded literary fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Jack Kerouac House Orlando, and Hawthornden Castle Scotland, and she is a member of the Arts Council Writers in Prisons Scheme. In 2018-19 she is composing a libretto for an upcoming opera production.

 

Kaveh Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran. His poems appear recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation, Tin House, Best American Poetry, The New Republic, The Guardian, Ploughshares, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. His debut full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, won the 2017 Julie Suk Award(Jacar Press). His chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press. His work has been praised by Patricia Smith, Nick Flynn and received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. He is a professor at Purdue University and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.

 

Renee Emerson earned her MFA in poetry from Boston University where she studied with Louise Gluck and Robert Pinsky, and where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2009.  She is the author of two full-length collections Keeping Me Still (Winter Goose Publishing) and Threshing Floor (Jacar Press), and 3 chapbooks. In 2016, she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant by the Arkansas Arts Council.  Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize on three occasions.

Big Poetry Giveaway 2018

April 9, 2018 By in Announcement, Contest, Shout Out Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Welcome to the Big Poetry Giveaway! To participate in the giveaway and to find other blogs that are doing giveaways, check out this post.

There are two ways to participate in the 2018 giveaway! 1. Just post a comment with your name and email address included. Please also let me know your first choice, if you win.  2. Host a giveaway on your own blog! See this link for how to host your own giveaway and have your site included, and also an excellent FAQ on the project.

Book One 

Fanny Says, poems by Nickole Brown. I am fortunate enough to have picked up two copies of this fantastic collection, and I want to share one! Of Fanny Says, poet Patricia Smith says “Nickole Brown’s unleashed love song to her grandmother is raucous and heart-rending, reflective and slap-yo-damn-knee hilarious, a heady meld of lyrical line and life lesson.”

 

Book Two

Red Sky, Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women, an anthology of work featuring poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, Tony Hoagland, Thylias Moss, Fady Joudah, Jaki Shelton Green, Hélène Cardona, Zeina Hashem Beck, and the work of 100+ poets in response to globally oppressive physical, psychological, emotional, and systemic violence against women. Red Sky  is a collection of work by established and widely published poets as well as new and emergent voices around the world and is a collection of what is dark, yes, within, but also what is light.

 

 

The giveaway ends on April 30th at midnight, at which point I will use a random number generator to select the winners. Find others who are giving away poetry listed here.

Good luck, and Happy National Poetry Month!

 

What Catches the Light | poem

February 10, 2018 By in Poetry

What Catches the Light

I press the handle of a knife into his hand
and he scrapes the shimmer of salmon,
the red flesh face down against his palm,
where the scales collect like sooted snow.

He speaks with a voice low like dusk,
wipes the blade clean with his fingers
tells a story of the Red Sea, thick with fish.
When he mentions his father, his heart

thickens in his throat, and when we get to his own blood
count how many years we’ll have together.
A sea of blood, his blood, antibodies
swimming in his veins.

I can’t remember the names of the fish,
only how he scrapes with a surgeon’s precision,
feeling for what he cannot see but knows is there

preparing this meal for us
while the sky silvers outside the window
and he talks about death
but I think he is talking about love.

[With gratitude to the editors at Red Paint Hill Journal, who originally published this poem.]

A Virtual Interview with the Editors of Red Sky, by Cindy Huyser

February 9, 2018 By in Interview Tags: , , , , ,

Much gratitude to Cindy Huyser for the following interview prior to the Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women reading that was featured on Thursday, February 8, 2018 from 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman at 5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX.  Bookwoman is Austin’s premiere feminist bookstore, soon to be celebrating 40 years of serving the Austin feminist and queer communities.

Thank you, Cindy, for your generous interview questions for Gabrielle, Stacy and me. Read the interview here.

Special thanks and big love to Bookwoman and to everyone that was a part of the evening. I truly wish I could have been there. And I hope there are pictures! 

~M.

before the rain | Owl’s Roost Trail

November 15, 2017 By in Photography Tags: , , , , ,

“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” — Aristotle

I set out to check out the Owl’s Roost Trail north of town at Bur-Mil Park. It was grey and chilly, perfect match to my mood and I had a new lens to try. Owl’s Roost is a hiking trail but also allows mountain bikes (I found someone’s fun bike-cam video here that follows the trail.). A couple of times I had to pause and wait for the bikes to pass in fairly large numbers. Pretty cool.

Mid-November and by now the trees have shed half of their leaves. The lake was the color of the sky, a shade of flint or gunmetal, still and sheet-like. (I already miss the lush, warm summer hikes and will until next season. “The green in my eyes.”)

After a little while, a mist began to fall through the thinning tree canopies, down onto the well-worn path. I’d stopped so often to look that I hadn’t gone as far as I thought. With what felt like imminent downpour, and me in just a sweater and jeans and without rain gear, I picked my way back to the car.

Sharing some of the photos here.

Found elsewhere, but related: the Buddha belly tree at Bur-Mil