Jump to navigation Skip to content
Spoonbill & Sugartown, Booksellers was established in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg in 1999. The shop specializes in used, rare, and new books on contemporary art, architecture, and various design fields with an emphasis on imported or hard-to-find selections. Thousands of books are hand-picked for clientele from the eclectic collection of philosophy, literature, cinema, and children’s books.
In 2009, Rebecca Fitting and Jessica Stockon Bagnulo opened Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with the support of the Fort Greene Association and a Community Lender Program. This independent bookstore carries a robust selection in a wide variety of genres, and has a full calendar of events for adults and children.
"We're all going to die—and poems can help us live with that." In this TED talk literary critic Stephen Burt uses his favorite poems to help convey how poetry (simply a set of techniques used to make patterns that put emotions into words) can help us further understand and cope with what it means to be a person.
For the eighth installment of our Winners on Winning series, we spoke with Chris Hosea, the winner of the 2013 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his debut collection, Put Your Hands In. The prize, given annually to a poet who has not yet published a book, includes $5,000, publication, and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Hosea's winning manuscript, selected by John Ashbery, was published by Louisiana State University Press in March. Hosea received his MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and is a senior copywriter at H4B Chelsea. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
What kind of impact has winning the Whitman Award had on your career?
I'm pretty sure the Whitman Award helped me recently to land a new job, with better pay and more impressive-sounding title, in advertising. Creative distinctions, and particularly established institutional honors, are valued in such industries.
Has winning this award, or previous awards, changed the way you approach your work?
I'm certain that contest judge John Ashbery's comparison between my poems and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descebding a Staircase, and even more Ashbery's remarks about derision and eroticism in Put Your Hands In, will affect my writing for the rest of my life.
Have you ever entered a contest that you didn't win?
I have entered hundreds of contests and spent thousands of dollars on fees. If you don't play, you can't win.
What advice would you offer to writers thinking of submitting to writing contests?
Sequencing is important. Give yourself at least a month to order and reorder the poems in your book. Also, contest screeners are often (though by no means always) young students who haven't read a lot of poetry before: so include some lyrical candy up front.
For more Winners on Winning, read the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and check back next Wednesday for a new installment.
Hosea: Myles Paige
Shakespeare & Co. is an iconic Manhattan bookstore in the Upper East Side neighborhood founded in 1983. The store is adjacent to the Hunter College campus and includes a high-quality café. Their second location is in the Upper West Side on Broadway.
The Sonnet Project combines cinematic art with the poetry of William Shakespeare, set against the backdrop of New York City. The goal of the project is to film all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, each performed by a different actor in a carefully chosen New York City location. This is their sixty-seventh film.
Dr. Maya Angelou's joyous poem "Phenomenal Woman" trumpets: "I'm a woman / phenomenally. / Phenomenal woman, / that's me." After her passing last Wednesday, many who have been touched by her words and wisdom have been reflecting on Angelou's rich life. Today, take a moment to reflect on a phenomenal woman in your life and write a poem in her honor. Think about what makes her unique, and attempt to translate the essence of her spirit into the written word.
"I have come from farming to poetry." Amit Dahiyabadshah is the founder of the poetry movement Delhi Poetree. In this video for TEDx Tughlaq Rd, he performs and speaks with humor and gravity about his experiences in the fast-growing city of Delhi. "I gave you the green revolution from just two acres of land, you have left me with a wallpaper village of posters, and just two acres of sand."
Submissions are open for the 2014 Paz Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Center for Literature and Theater at Miami Dade College and the National Poetry Series. An award of $2,000 and publication of a bilingual edition by Akashic Books will be given for a poetry collection written in Spanish by a U.S. resident. A translator will translate the winning entry from Spanish to English.
Submit a manuscript of at least 48 pages by June 15. There is no entry fee. Submissions can be sent by mail to the National Poetry Series, Paz Prize for Poetry, 57 Mountain Avenue, Princeton, NJ 08540. Richard Blanco will judge.
The biennial Paz prize was established in 2012 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Center for Literature and Theater at Miami Dade College. In response to why the prize was started, Lissette Mendez, the programs director at the center, says, “It’s hard for poets to publish, but poets who write in English have many contests they can enter in the U.S., as well as many independent presses and university presses to which they can submit manuscripts. It’s not quite that easy for poets who write in other languages—most publishers of foreign language books are in other countries. And then there is the issue of translation. The Paz Prize really works as a shortcut—publication in the U.S. by a wonderful, highly respected independent press in a bilingual edition. And our partner, National Poetry Series, is one of the most important poetry organizations in the country. It’s a wonderful thing to help a writer’s work get to the greater world, to help her or him find readers.”
Akashic Books, the Brooklyn-based press that will publish the winning collection, describes itself as committed to publishing work by authors who “are either ignored by the mainstream, or have no interest in working within the ever-consolidating ranks of the major corporate publishers.”
The 2012 winner of the Paz Prize, Dinapiera Di Donato, is a Venezuelan poet living in New York City. She won for her collection Colaterales/Collateral, which was chosen by Victor Hernandez Cruz, and translated by the poet Ricardo Alberto Maldonado.
The prize is named after the Mexican poet, essayist, and diplomat Octavio Paz (1914-1998), who wrote numerous poetry collections in Spanish from 1933 to 1989. He won the Cervantes Award in 1981, the Neustadt Prize in 1982, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.
Paz: La Jornada
"Patience smiles patiently for a déjà vu spectacle." British poet and artist Dean Pasch's short film "Into the Room of Waiting," based on his poem "To Smile," was recently screened at the 2014 ReVersed Poetry Film Festival in Amsterdam. Through snippets of scenes and recollections pieced together in a video collage of impressions, Pasch attempts to further explore the understanding of existence.
