“One ear to the singing black boulder…” In this video, Simone White, recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for poetry, reads her poem “Some Creek” from her collection Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem Books, 2016).
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Simone White
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Mythmakers and Lawbreakers
Ursula K. Le Guin reads from her novels The Dispossessed (Harper & Row, 1974) and Always Coming Home (Harper & Row, 1985) at Powell’s Books in 2010 in this video produced by pdxjustice Media Productions.
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Ursula K. Le Guin on Earthsea
“I didn’t know I was being helpful to anybody. I was just telling a story I wanted to tell.” Ursula K. Le Guin talks about her Earthsea series and the unexpected connections she has made with her readers. Le Guin died on January 22, 2018 at the age of eighty-eight.
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Dan Beachy-Quick
“I write because I read. I imagine many of us are this way, bewildered in the tangle of these co-creative activities: writing to understand how better to read, reading to understand how better to write. I seek out—both for inspiration and comfort—those writers who seem to share, and to illuminate, that confounding sense of wonder. Dearest to my heart over the past few years is Sir Thomas Browne. Every book he writes—Urne-Buriall, Religio Medici, The Garden of Cyrus—reveals to me again and again what thinking beauty a mind of true curiosity can create. He is one of those writers who, on any page randomly opened to, has placed a sentence that feels as if it contains some whole secret to the living of life itself. For one example, ‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.’ Maybe that is the light we read by, that sun within us. At least, it can feel so, reading Browne’s pages, and so learning to think as he worked to think, and to see by his good light.”
—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017)
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92Y Unterberg Poetry Center
Type:
Reading Venue
Writers Space
Writing Center
Website:
Phone:
(212) 415-5760
Contact Name:
Since 1939, the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center has given audiences a chance to hear writers in every literary genre offering frequent talks and events throughout the year.
Address:
1395 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY10128↧
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You Were Never Really Here
You Were Never Really Here, Jonathan Ames’s crime thriller about a tormented gunman hired to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a senator, has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by Lynne Ramsay, the film stars Alessandro Nivola, Joaquin Phoenix, and Ekaterina Samsonov.
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The Alienist
The Alienist (Random House, 1994), Caleb Carr’s historical suspense novel, has been adapted into a television series. The series stars Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning, and follows an investigative duo using innovative forensic science techniques to solve a serial murder crime in nineteenth-century New York City.
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Amanda Ngoho Reavey
With whom do you prefer to work?:
Adults
Seniors
In which languages are you fluent?:
English
How do you want to identify yourself?:
Filipino American
First Name:
Amanda Ngoho
Last Name:
Reavey
E-mail:
Raised in (Country):
United States
completed
Photo of the Author:
Link to Resume:
Are you willing to travel to give readings?:
Yes
Are you interested in giving readings?:
Yes
Listed as:
Creative Nonfiction Writer
Yes
Raised in (State):
Wisconsin
Website:
Private E-mail:
link 0, location and date:
The Conversant
Application Accepted:
Application Accepted
link 1:
link 1, location and date:
American Microreviews & Interviews
Milwaukee, WI
1919 N. Summit Ave., Unite 10B
Milwaukee, WI53202link 2, location and date:
TAYO Literary Magazine
Prizes Won:
2017 Best Book Award in Poetry, Association for Asian American Studies
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Krys Lee
“That was really one of my goals when I wrote the book, to create a human experience rather than the so-called North Korean experience for readers.” Author and translator Krys Lee speaks about her debut novel, How I Became a North Korean (Viking, 2016), and what she hopes to accomplish through her writing.
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Holes in the Mountain
Holes in the Mountain is a poetry film by Kai Carlson-Wee, shot during a freight-hopping trip from Oakland, California to Portland, Oregon in 2014. Carlson-Wee’s debut poetry collection, Rail, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April 2018.
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A Tribute to Denis Johnson
Marie Arana, literary advisor at the Library of Congress, presents a video tribute of the late Denis Johnson, who was awarded the 2017 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Johnson’s second story collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (Random House, 2018), is featured in Page One in the January/February 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Danez Smith on Surrealism
“We are surreal beings.... We dream, which is the most surreal thing in the world.” Danez Smith speaks with Lauren K. Alleyne in this video for The Fight & The Fiddle, a publication of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in poetry.
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James Han Mattson
“In my early thirties, I spent two years in Korea, investigating the particulars of my adoption and reuniting with my birth family. While there, I took Korean classes, and since I’d never had any real Korean instruction before, I became, for a while, a toddler, learning letters and sounds and words and numbers. Studying something as elemental as an alphabet enlivened a part of my brain that’d been dormant for years; overnight, it seemed, I viewed language not as a sophisticated mode of communication but as an elegant arrangement of shapes and sounds. Hangul—the Korean alphabet—reacquainted me with language’s basic component, the letter, and often, when I’m stuck on my novel, I will take to a notebook and write sentence after sentence in Korean. My Korean vocabulary is abysmal, so I write most of these sentences as hangul creations of English words, but even so, this practice forces me to slow down, to appreciate sound, rhythm, and character design. When I go back to my novel, the words reverberate and become noisy, making the book itself more animated and alive. The linguistic energy emerging from the pages reinvigorates my enthusiasm for the story itself.”
—James Han Mattson, author of The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (Little A, 2017)
Writer Photo:
Writer Photo Credit:
Tara Mattson
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The Allure of James Joyce’s Ulysses
In this animated TED-Ed lesson, Sam Slote, an associate professor at Trinity College Dublin and the author of Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), explains what makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a literary masterpiece and why Joyce, himself, once said: “If Ulysses isn’t worth reading, then life isn’t worth living.”
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Nausheen Eusuf
First Name:
Nausheen
Born in (Country):
Bangladesh
Last Name:
Eusuf
Born in (City):
Dhaka
Male
Photo of the Author:
completed
Are you willing to travel to give readings?:
Yes
Are you interested in giving readings?:
Yes
Yes
Private Phone:
617-947-9536
Listed as:
Poet
Website:
Application Accepted:
Application Accepted
Private E-mail:
49 Carleton Street
Newton, MA02458English Department, Boston University
236 Bay State Road
Boston, MA02215↧
Fred Bass Remembered
At a public memorial at New York City’s Strand Book Store, family members, colleagues, and writers including Gay Talese, Fran Lebowitz, and Paul Krugman remember and honor Fred Bass, the bookstore’s longtime owner who died at the age of eighty-nine on January 3. The bookstore was founded by Bass’s father in 1927, and he began working there at the age of thirteen, taking over its management in 1956.
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Michael Ferro
With whom do you prefer to work?:
Any
Michigan
In which languages are you fluent?:
English
How do you want to identify yourself?:
Italian American
First Name:
Michael
Born in (Country):
United States
Last Name:
Ferro
Born in (City):
Detroit
E-mail:
Male
Photo of the Author:
completed
Are you willing to travel to give readings?:
Yes
Listed as:
Fiction Writer
Are you interested in giving readings?:
Yes
Private Phone:
586-873-1551
Yes
link 0:
Website:
Private E-mail:
Application Accepted:
Application Accepted
link 1:
7044 Pamela Drive
Ypsilanti, MI48197Ann Arbor, MI48109
link 2:
link 3:
link 4, location and date:
Fall 2017
link 4:
Prizes Won:
Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train for their Short Story Award for New Writers (May/June 2017) Jim Cash Creative Writing Award for Fiction 2017 Pushcart Prize nomination
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Please Bury Me in This
“I am writing to you as an act of / immolation, relief…” Allison Benis White reads from her third poetry collection, Please Bury Me in This (Four Way Books, 2017), which won the 2018 University of North Texas Rilke Prize.
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Editor’s Note
The Eternal Optimism of Creative Minds
I wish I could say I always see the glass as half full, that a brilliant glow of optimism illuminates my every thought, but it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Even before the events of the past year or so, when the earth seemed to slip a few degrees off its axis, casting a psychic shadow that has thrown into stark relief some of our most pressing issues, such as climate change, gun violence, racial injustice, and sexual misconduct—long-standing problems that, seen in this new light, are impossible to ignore—I leaned toward the half-empty view. Over the years I’ve met plenty of folks who simply beam positivity, who don’t seem to ponder the darker aspects of life (none of them, I now realize, are writers). They have a pleasant way about them, of course, but if I listen to their sunny viewpoints long enough, I begin to suspect they’re staring just a bit offstage. Sort of like the meme of the dog sitting in a room engulfed in flames: “This is fine.”
Longtime readers of this magazine—thank you, sincerely—know by now that we acknowledge a bit of the darkness on our way to the light. We address those periods of uncertainty, revision, and rejection that are just as much a part of the writer’s life as book deals and accolades. Anything less, it seems to me, would convey a false sense of ease, establishing unrealistic expectations. Writers are too smart to fall for that. So, rather than treat a theme like Inspiration as some sort of celestial gift—received by writers, supine on their daybeds—our special section offers a number of active strategies for overcoming common obstacles: writer’s block, reconnecting after a long silence, approaching tired material with fresh eyes. Elsewhere in this issue we look at even more difficult subjects and how writers are dealing with them. Maya Popa examines how poets and activists are responding to gun violence; Gila Lyons explores the American Prison Writing Archive; Jay Baron Nicorvo traces the divergent paths of an imagination under the pressure of post-traumatic stress disorder.
So much about the world right now is not “fine.” That’s not pessimism; it’s reality. Want to be inspired? Consider how writers are facing that reality in ways that are personal, political, communal, confrontational. The line on our cover “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World” is not meant to be sensational. It’s a reminder; it’s evidence of the eternal optimism, the endless wonder that is built into us as writers. It’s a new year. Imagine what we can do.
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Split Mouth
“In place of a mother tongue, I grew a forked fin.” Franny Choi reads her poem “Split Mouth” at the 2017 Rustbelt Regional Poetry Festival. Choi is the author of the debut collection, Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), and the chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017).
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