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Last December Ivan Tresoldi, a street poetry artist from Milano, Italy, led a workshop for young Kosovo Serbian poets and artists sponsored by forumZFD, a bipartisan organization with a mission to push for "the realization of the idea of a Civilian Peace Service." The aim of the workshop was to help participants deal with the past and create poetry and art along the topic of memories and identities. For more information about Kosovo, visit the State Department's Web site.
Kansas-born poet Ben Lerner, author of Mean Free Path (2010), Angle of Yaw (2006), and The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), has become the first American poet to win the Preis für International Poesie der Stadt Münster, a poetry translation award given biennially by the city of Münster, Germany. Lerner, whose books are all published by Copper Canyon Press, won for his debut collection, translated into German by Steffen Popp as Die Lichtenbergfiguren and published by Germany’s Luxbooks.
Past winners of the prize, given since 1993, include Tomaž Šalamun, Hugo Claus, Zbigniew Herbert, and Inger Christensen. Lerner was selected for the tenth award by judges Urs Allemann, Michael Braun, Cornelia Jentzsch, Johan P. Tammen, Wendela Beate Vilhjalmsson, and Norbert Wehr.
In the video below, Lerner reads from The Lichtenberg Figures at the College of New Jersey.
Write a poem on a page of today's newspaper, allowing your eye to wander slightly and take in the language on the page, and for your text to overlay the text on the page. If you fix your eye on a specific word or phrase, incorporate it into the composition.
Linda Gray Sexton's memoir Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, originally published in 1994 by Little, Brown, was just rereleased in paperback by Counterpoint Press. Anne Sexton herself wrote a play titled Mercy Street, and a posthumous book of poetry, 45 Mercy Street, was published in 1976, two years after she committed suicide. In 1986, Peter Gabriel released his fifth album, So, which includes the song "Mercy Street," dedicated to the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
Yesterday the Lambda Literary Foundation announced the finalists for its twenty-third annual "Lammy" literary awards. Books are considered on the basis of their being authored by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender writers or depicting LGBT characters.
Below are the contenders for prizes in poetry, fiction, and debut fiction, selected from a record pool of entries: 520 titles submitted by 230 publishers. The full lists of finalists in the additional Lammy categories, including biography, anthology, and erotica, are available on the Lambda Literary Foundation Web site.
Gay Poetry darkacre by Greg Hewett (Coffee House Press) then, we were still living by Michael Klein (GenPop Books) Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Pleasure by Brian Teare (Ahsahta Press) The Salt Ecstasies: Poems by James L. White (Graywolf Press)
Lesbian Poetry Money for Sunsets by Elizabeth J. Colen (Steel Toe Books) The Inquisition Yours by Jen Currin (Coach House Books) The Sensual World Re-emerges by Eleanor Lerman (Sarabande Books) White Shirt by Laurie MacFayden (Frontenac House) The Nights Also by Anna Swanson (Tightrope Books)
Gay Debut Fiction XOXO Hayden by Chris Corkum (P. D. Publishing) Probation by Tom Mendicino (Kensington Publishing) Bob the Book by David Pratt (Chelsea Station Editions) The Palisades by Tom Schabarum (Cascadia Publishing) Passes Through by Rob Stephenson (University of Alabama Press)
Lesbian Debut Fiction Alcestis by Katharine Beutner (Soho Press) Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn (Arsenal Pulp Press) Fall Asleep Forgetting by Georgeann Packard (The Permanent Press) The More I Owe You by Michael Sledge (Counterpoint Press) One More Stop by Lois Walden (Arcadia Books)
Bisexual Fiction Fall Asleep Forgetting by Georgeann Packard (The Permanent Press) If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous (Harper Perennial) Krakow Melt by Daniel Allen Cox (Arsenal Pulp Press) The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes (Harper Perennial) Pride/Prejudice: A Novel of Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, and Their Forbidden Lovers by Ann Herendeen (Harper Paperbacks)
Gay Fiction By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer (Soft Skull) Consolation by Jonathan Strong (Pressed Wafer) The Silver Hearted by David McConnell (Alyson Books) Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett (Doubleday)
Lesbian Fiction Big Bang Symphony by Lucy Jane Bledsoe (University of Wisconsin Press) Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle by Zelda Lockhart (LaVenson Press) Holding Still for as Long as Possible by Zoe Whittall (House of Anansi), also a finalist in the transgender fiction category Homeschooling by Carol Guess (PS Publishing) Inferno by Eileen Myles (OR Books)
The winners will be honored at a gala held at the School of Visual Arts in New York City on May 26.
In the video below, Lesbian Fiction finalist Eileen Myles discusses her nominated book.
The author of five poetry collections, including Ghost in a Red Hat, which was just published by W. W. Norton, Rosanna Warren reads “Aftermath,” one in a series of elegies she wrote the for poet Deborah Tall, who died of breast cancer in 2006. This reading took place on March 7, 2011 at Nyack College.
The documentary Behind Those Books, written by Kaven Brown, directed by Mills Miller, and featuring interviews with Terry McMillan, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Kevin Powell, is billed as "the first and only comprehensive documentation, on film, of the urban literature genre, giving viewers a raw and uncut look inside the emerging industry." It will premiere May 28 at Tribeca Cinemas in New York City.
In this rather raw clip, Nick Demske responds to the political situation in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of protesters—some of them on tractors—descended on the state Capitol over the weekend, with a poem.
Choose a poem that you are in the process of revising. Draw a map of that poem, paying attention to the details of its landscape, its realities and abstractions, its landmarks, the spacial relationships among its features. Use the map to guide a revision of the initial work.
Last night the National Book Critics Circle celebrated its favorite books of 2010, announcing National Book Critics Circle Award winners in poetry, fiction, and autobiography. C. D. Wright took home the prize in poetry forOne With Others (Copper Canyon), a work of verse journalism investigating the Civil Rights movement in the poet's native Arkansas.
"She’s developed a new form, if not a new genre," says NBCC board member Craig Morgan Teicher in a review of Wright's book, "that allows for a new
blending of fact and feeling, one which could help us tell our stories
going forward, if only we’ll let it school us."
In fiction, Jennifer Egan won in fiction for A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf). Board member Collette Bancroft says of Egan's time-leaping novel-in-stories, "A Visit From the Goon Squad wraps big themes—art and its
relationship with technology, the fluid nature of the self, love and its
loss—in stories with a satiric edge, believable but never predictable
characters, and a range of styles masterfully rendered."
In autobiography, Darin Strauss won for Half a Life (McSweeney's Books), a memoir of the author's life after a devastating accident involving one of his high school classmates. "What might have been exploitative instead feels important, and dearly won," says board member Karen Long.
In the video below, filmed last week, Wright reads from her winning volume at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
