“Let Nature be your teacher,” wrote William Wordsworth in his poem “The Tables Turned.” As spring arrives, seek out changes in the environment around you and jot down some observations: later sunsets, lighter clothing, the pastel colors of budding leaves and flowers, the buzzing and chirping of insects and birds. Write a personal essay that explores your relationship with nature, whether that involves being out in the woods or desert, or interactions with urban wildlife and navigating public transportation in extreme weather conditions. Reflect upon the ways in which the natural world introduces itself into your everyday life and how it affects your moods and emotions. How does the changing light and weather influence your daily rhythms? Are you uplifted and energized by a sense of renewal, or exasperated by pollen and allergies? What has nature taught you about yourself?

In classic Greek tragedies, the term hamartia, first described in Aristotle’s Poetics, refers to a fatal flaw in the main character of the drama, which causes a chain of events to unfold: a reversal of fortune from good to bad, and the eventual downfall of the character. One traditional example of such a flaw is hubris, an overblown ego and lack of humility. Write a short story in which your protagonist suffers from an unfortunate degree of hubris. Does overconfident pride blind the character to the consequences of that individual’s actions? Does arrogance lead the protagonist toward one big mistake, or several small errors that lead inevitably to tragic misfortune?

Imbolo Mbue has won the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for her debut novel, Behold the Dreamers (Random House, 2016). She will receive $15,000, and will be honored at a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. on May 6. The annual award is given for a book of fiction published during the previous year.

Imbolo Mbue

“Behold The Dreamers displays a remarkable confidence impressive for a debut novel,” says Chris Abani, who judged the prize along with Chantel Acevedo and Sigrid Nunez. “Imbolo Mbue has a fine ear for dialogue and the nuance of language. Without ever leaning into sentimentality and yet managing to steer clear of cruelty, she pushes her characters through true difficulties into a believable and redemptive transformation. Behold The Dreamers reveals a writer with a capacious imagination, and the warmth and compassion to craft a career of beautiful and important novels.”

Imbolo Mbue is a native of Limbe, Cameroon, and currently lives in New York City. Mbue was one of the five featured authors in Poets & Writers Magazine’s 2016 roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction; read an excerpt of Behold the Dreamers in “First Fiction 2016” and listen to Mbue read the excerpt in episode eight of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.

The finalists for the prize, who each receive $5,000, were Viet Dinh for After Disasters (Little A), Louise Erdrich for LaRose (HarperCollins), Garth Greenwell for What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Sunil Yapa for Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (Little, Brown). The finalists were selected from almost five hundred novels and story collections submitted by 143 publishers.

Established in 1981, the PEN/Faulkner Award has also been given to James Hannaham, Karen Joy Fowler, E. L. Doctorow, Ann Patchett, John Updike, and Sherman Alexie, among others.

“For the first time, I agreed last year to cotranslate a book from a language I don’t speak at all…. It was an opportunity for new kinds of thinking but also new kinds of failure,” writes poet, novelist, and translator Idra Novey in her essay “Writing While Translating.” Many contemporary writers have expanded the art of translation by experimenting with form and content: Mary Jo Bang filled her translation of Dante’s Inferno (Graywolf Press, 2012) with pop culture references; David Cameron used spell-check and word-association methods for Flowers of Bad (Unbelievable Alligator/Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007), his “false translation” of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal; and Paul Legault’s The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s Books, 2012) is a translation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry into one-line renderings, from English into a different version of English. Try your hand at translating a short series of poems from one language to another. Use your knowledge of another language, slang, dictionaries, or any unlikely source to explore the elasticity of language while considering how new kinds of failure might inspire a refreshing direction for your writing.

Theodore (ted) Kerr, is a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective. He is a Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based writer, organizer, and artist. His work has appeared in the Advocate, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Lambda Literary, BOMB, the New Inquiry, and many other publications. Kerr received his MA from Union Theological Seminary and is the former programs manager for Visual AIDS. 

In 2015, a group of artists, educators, activists, writers, doulas, and healthcare workers came together for an informal think tank to discuss social, cultural, and political issues that surround HIV/AIDS—which include criminalization, stigma, and ways AIDS history is being remembered and disremembered. From there we formed a collective, and started meeting monthly. What became obvious to us soon in the process was that we, as a group, had to check in with each other to figure out what we knew and felt about HIV. Each of us—whether living with the virus or being deeply impacted by it—had different experiences and awareness of the epidemic. At the same time, doula work had become ever more present in our communities—birth doulas, end of life doulas, abortion doulas, gender doulas—folks who fundamentally hold space for someone during a time of transition. We came to understand that we needed to doula ourselves, that is, to hold space for each other in order to better understand the current reality of the virus, to better consider what contemporary responses to AIDS should look like. To do this, we began with a question: What would an HIV doula do?

Since then, our collective has worked to bring community back to the HIV response and begin a conversation around how to ensure that the state and AIDS nonprofit organizations work for people living with the virus, and not the other way around. We do our work in open meetings and at events. AIDS is a public issue and should be treated as such. Long before the response to HIV became professionalized, before it even had a name, the communities affected by it responded in the streets. They protested, walked each other’s dogs, carried caskets, filed paperwork, saved art, held each other’s hands. In the course of our work, we have been reminded of a fundamental truth about the epidemic: No one gets HIV alone. And so no one should have to deal with it alone. When it comes to the virus, it is always, HIV with. So when the opportunity to work with Poets & Writers came up, we jumped at the chance to use writing as a way to bring together people who were living with HIV, or have been deeply impacted by it.

With the support of Poets & Writers, we created a five-part workshop series titled HIV WITH. For each session, a different theme—trauma, spirituality, public health, language, witnessing—and its relation to HIV would be explored under the guidance of a writer and a cofacilitator. For the second workshop of the series, poet and educator Timothy DuWhite and dancer and healer iele paloumpis came together to explore HIV through the interconnected systems of the mind, body, soul, and government. After delivering a powerful presentation on how the state often fails and targets people of color when it comes to HIV, the facilitators assigned writing prompts that had us respond to the ideas presented. iele invited us to get up from our seats, and—based on writing we had done in the room—use our bodies to express a journey we have had with HIV. As a writer, I was moved by this exercise. By the end of the workshop, I felt compelled to write more, buoyed by the shared experience of cracking spines, tears, hugs, comfort eating, and putting proverbial pen to paper. 

So much of writing is about being vulnerable on the page, alone, and then sending it out into the world. So much about HIV is about our bodies, risk, and judgement. Support from Poets & Writers has enabled the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective to build communal spaces where we can work to reduce the harm of HIV, transform the pain and stigma surrounding it, and be active participants in ensuring it metamorphosizes into health and resilience, through written word. As we continue to uncover what the response to HIV is and needs to be, we are reminded by opportunities like this workshop series that we need each other, that we have each other, and writing can be a way of healing.

Support for the Readings & Workshops Program in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis and Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.

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.

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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. 

Photographer Akasha Rabut has documented the Caramel Curves—New Orleans’s first all-female motorcycle club—in a series of portraits over several years. The club has become a unique pillar of their local community, with some seeing the women as role models. Write an essay meditating on a group or a person from your past who unexpectedly made an impact on your community. Were you personally affected by their actions? 

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.

Jenny Xie

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.