Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin

The first lines of a dozen noteworthy books, including Casting Deep Shade by C. D. Wright and The White Card: A Play by Claudia Rankine.
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The first lines of a dozen noteworthy books, including Casting Deep Shade by C. D. Wright and The White Card: A Play by Claudia Rankine.
A poet discusses five journals that published poems from his third collection, As One Fire Consumes Another.
A round-up of four new anthologies, including A People’s Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction From 25 Extraordinary Writers edited by Victor LaValle.
Fifteen years in the making, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is a dramatic masterwork, a parable-in-poems that confronts the darkness of war and terror with the blazing light of “a poet in love with the world.”
The annual twelve-day conference at the University of the South, featuring workshops, craft lectures, and a historic community of writers, turns thirty.
Ten of the best retreats, workshop programs, conferences, and festivals for emerging writers across the country.
“Let us bridge the generations and remind all who will listen that it only takes one woman sitting on a bus to inspire hundreds…” Amy Uyematsu, the author most recently of Basic Vocabulary (Red Hen Press, 2016), reads her poem “As American As” at the third annual Writers Resist Los Angeles reading at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California.
“I attempt to discuss, through a conflation of creation myths, the idea of being formed by literature,” writes Paige Ackerson-Kiely on the Poetry Society of America’s website about the title poem in her second collection, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012), which began as a response to arctic explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s memoirs. “One fact of my life...is that I have often been consoled by books, have found a life for myself within those pages, when that sort of life was not available to me on the outside.” Write a love poem that points to how you have been formed by your favorite books, writers, and literature. How has a particularly memorable work of literature provided you with consolation and love, and helped create an inner vitality?
“I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of.” —Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block
“If you ask me why representation in the media is important... / I will show you a woman who learned to dance until she / felt pretty...” On NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts, Ashlee Haze reads her poem “For Colored Girls (The Missy Elliot Poem)” as part of Blood Orange’s performance of “By Ourselves” from the album Negro Swan.