Podcasts about kate tufts discovery award

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark is the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Clark is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies. Her new book is Scorched Earth. Find more at: https://www.tianaclark.com/ As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/ This Week's Prompt: Write an ekphrastic poem based on a work of art by an artist that shares your first or last name. Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about a specific type of phobia you do not personally have but know of someone that does. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.

This week, acclaimed poets Diana Khoi Nguyen and Cindy Juyoung Ok read selections of their work, followed by a discussion of their processes, themes, techniques, and more. Presented by the Poetry Foundation. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival.AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOMEAbout the writers:A poet and multimedia artist, DIANA KHOI NGUYEN is the author of Ghost Of (2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Root Fractures (2024). Her video work has recently been exhibited at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art. Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she currently teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.CINDY JUYOUNG OK is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the translator of the forthcoming English translation of The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon.

Donika Kelly joins Kevin Young to read “One Hundred White-Sided Dolphins on a Summer Day,” by Mary Oliver, and her own poem “Sixteen Center.” Kelly is the author of two poetry collections, and the recipient of an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, she teaches at the University of Iowa.

In conversation with Airea D. Matthews Phillip B. Williams is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections, Thief in the Interior, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award; and Mutiny, which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. A creative writing professor in New York University's MFA creative writing program, he is the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. A surrealistic epic about the complexities of freedom and the boundaries of love, Ours tells the story of an 1830s-era conjuror who destroys plantations and spirits enslaved people away to a magically concealed community. Airea D. Matthews is the 2022–23 Philadelphia Poet Laureate and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College. Her collection Simulacra won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poets, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and VQR, among other journals. Matthews' other honors include a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Addressing themes of income inequality, commodification, and conventional economic theories, her most recent book Bread and Circus combines poetry, prose, and imagery to tell an intimate story about the author and her family. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees. (recorded 2/20/2024)

Valencia Robin's poem portrays a tense relationship between mother and daughter; perhaps each resembling the other too much. In desperation — and shock — the daughter says the worst thing she can think of to her mother. What follows is like the fall of a dictator, a coup, an end, an opening.Valencia Robin is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes poetry, painting, collage, and sculpture. A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, her debut poetry collection, Ridiculous Light, won Persea Books' First Book Prize, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was named one of Library Journal's best poetry books of 2019. A co-founder of GalleryDAAS at the University of Michigan, Robin has an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. Robin currently teaches at East Tennessee State University and lives in Johnson City, Tennessee.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We're pleased to offer Valencia Robin's poem, and invite you to read Pádraig's weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Join co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez in conversation with LitFriends Melissa Febos & Donika Kelly about their grand statements, big revelations, sentential seduction, queering forms, the power of vulnerability, and love poems. We're taking a break and will be back for our next episode with guests Yiyun Li & Edmund White on January 16,  2024. Happy Holidays, LitFam!   LINKS Libsyn Blog www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com www.melissafebos.com www.donikakelly.com LitFriends LinkTree LitFriends Insta LitFriends Facebook TRANSCRIPT Annie: (00:00) This episode is dedicated to Chuck, a dog we have loved, and Donika and Melissa's sweet pup.   Annie & Lito: Welcome to LitFriends! Hey Lit Friends!   Annie: Welcome to the show.    Lito: Today, we're speaking with memoirist Melissa Febos and poet Donika Kelly, lit friends in marriage,   Annie: About seduction, big boss feelings, and sliding into DMs.   Lito: So grab your bestie,   Annie & Lito: And get ready to fall in love!   Annie: What I love about Melissa Febos, and you can feel this across all four of her books, is how she declares herself free. There's no ambiguity to this. This is her story, not your telling of it, not your telling of her. I meet her on the page as someone who's in an act of rebellion or an act of defiance. And I was not really surprised but delighted to find that, when I read Donika Kelly, I had sort of the same reaction, same impression. And I'm wondering if that's true for you, and, Lito, what your understanding of vulnerability and its relationship to power is.   Lito: The power for me in these conversations, and the power that the authors that we speak with possess, seems to me, in the ways that they have found how they are completely unique from each other. And more so than in our other conversations, Donika and Melissa, their work is so different. And yet, as you've pointed out, the overlap, and the fire, the energy, the defiance, the fierceness is so present. And it was present in our conversation. And so inspiring.   Annie: Yeah. I'm thinking even about Melissa Febos has this Ted Talk. (01:54) Where she says "telling your secrets will set you free." And it feels that not only is that true, but it's also very much an act of self reclamation and strength, right? Where we might read it as an act of weakness. It's actually in fact, a harnessing of the self.   Lito: Right, it's not that Melissa has a need to confess. It's that she really uses writing to find the truth about herself and how she feels about something, which that could not differ more from my writing practice.   Annie: How so?   Lito: I find that I sort of, I write out of an emotion or a need to discover something, but I already sort of am aware of where I am and who I am before I start. I find the plot and the characters as I go, but I know sort of how I feel.   Annie: Yeah, I think for me, I do feel like writing is an act of discovery where maybe I put something on the page, it's the initial conception, or yeah, like you coming out of a feeling. But as I start to ask questions, right, for me, it's this process of inquiry. I excavate to something maybe a little more surprising or partially hidden or unknown to myself.   Lito: That's true. There is a discovery of, and I think you're, I think you've pointed to exactly what it is. It's the process of inquiry, and I think both of them, and obviously us, we're doing that similar thing. This is about writing, about this, this is about asking questions and writing through them.   Annie: Yeah, and Donika Kelly, we feel that in her work, her poetry over and over, even when they have the same recurring, I would say haunting images or artifacts. Each time she's turning it over and asking almost unbearable questions.   Lito: Right.   Annie: And we're joining her on the page because she is brave enough and has an iron will and says, no, I will not not look this in the eye.    Lito: That's the feeling exactly that I get from both of them is the courage, the bravura of the unflinching.   Annie: I think something that seemed to resonate with you was (03:58) how they talk about writing outside of publishing right? Yeah.   Lito: Yeah, I love I love that they talk about writing as a practice regardless, they're separated from The need to produce a work that's gonna sell in a commercial world in a capitalist society. It's more about the daily practice, and how that is a lifestyle and even what you said about the TED talk, that's just her. She's just talking about herself. Like that she's just telling an absolute truth that people don't typically talk about.   Annie: Right. And it's a conscious, active way to live inside one's life. It's a form of reflection, meditation, and rather than just moving through life, a way to make meaning of the experience.   Lito: I love that you use the word meditation because when you talk about meditation, you think of someone in a lotus position quietly being, but the meditations that both of them do, these are not quiet.   Annie: No. And of course we have to talk about how cute they are as married literary besties.   Lito: Oh my god, cute and like, they're hot for each other.   Annie: Oh my god.   Lito: It's palpable.   Annie: So palpable, sliding into DMs, chatting each other up over email.   Lito: They romanced each other, and I hope—no—I know they're gonna romance you, listener.   Annie: We'll be right back.   Lito: (05:40) Back to the show.   Annie: Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including the best-selling essay collection Girlhood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a Lambda finalist, and was named a notable book by NPR, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, and others. Her craft book Body Work is a national bestseller and an Indie's Next Pick. Her forthcoming novel The Dry Season is a work of mixed form nonfiction that explores celibacy as liberatory practice. Melissa lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly, and is a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.   Lito: Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award for poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Donika has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and was long listed for the National Book Award. (06:00) Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the writer Melissa Febos, and is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.   Annie: Well, thank you for joining us for LitFriends to talk about the ultimate lit friendship. It does seem like you've won at the game of lit friends a little bit, having married your lit friend. I think of you both as writers who are in the constant act of subversion and resisting erasure. And that's the kind of work that Lito and I are drawn to, and that we're trying to do ourselves. And your work really shows us how to inhabit our bravest and most complex selves on the page. So we're really grateful for that.   Melissa: Thanks.   Annie: Yeah, of course. I mean, Donika, I think about poems of yours that my friends and I revisit constantly because we're haunted by them in the best way. They've taken residence inside of us. And you talk about what it means to have to do that work. And you've said, "to admit need and pain, desire and trauma and claim my humanity was often daunting. But the book demanded I claim my personhood."   And Melissa, I think you know how much your work means to me. I mean, as someone who is raised as a girl in this country and writing creative nonfiction, Body Work should not be as revelatory as it is. Yet what I see is that you're shaping an entire generation of nonfiction writers, many of them women. So, you know, also very grateful for that. And you've talked about that in Body Work. You've said "the risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery to place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you." So we'll talk more in a bit about courage and vulnerability and how you all do the impossible things you do, but let's dive into your lit friendship.   Melissa: Thank you, Annie, for that beautiful introduction.   Donika: Yeah, thank you so much. I'm excited to talk about our friendship.   Lito: We're so excited to have you here.   Melissa: Talk about our special friendship.   Annie: Very special friendship. Friendship with benefits.   Lito: So tell us about your lit friend, Melissa, tell us about Donika.   Melissa: (09:07) Tell us about her. Okay, she's fucking hilarious, like very, very funny and covers a broad spectrum of humor from like, there's a lot of like punning that goes on in our house, a lot of like silly wordplay, bathroom humor, and then like high level, like, literary academic sort of witticism that's also making fun of itself a lot. And we've sort of operated in all of those registers since like the day we met.   She is my favorite poet. There's like those artists that whose work you really appreciate, right? Sometimes because it's so different from your own. And then there are those artists whose work registers in like a very deep sort of recognition where they feel like creative kin, right? And that has always been my experience of Donika's work. That there is a kind of creative intelligence and emotionality that just feels like so profoundly familiar to me and was before I knew anything about her as a human being.   Okay, we also like almost all the same candy and have extremely opposite work habits. She's very hot. She only likes to watch like TVs and movies that she's seen many times before, which is both like very comforting and very annoying.   Lito: Well, I'm gonna have to follow that up now. What are some of the top hits?   Melissa: Oh, for sure, Golden Girls is at the very top. I mean…   Annie: No one's mad at that.   Lito: We can do the interview right now. Perfect. All we need to know. A++!   Melissa: She's probably like 50% of the time that she's sleeping, she falls asleep to the soundtrack of the Golden Girls or Xena, maybe. But we've also watched the more recent James Bond franchise, The Matrices, (11:00) and Mission Impossible, never franchises I ever thought I would watch once, let alone multiple times at some point.   Annie: I mean, Donika, your queerness is showing with that list.   Lito: Yeah.   Donika: I feel seen. I feel represented accurately by that list. She's not wrong. She's not wrong at all. But I've also introduced to her the pleasure of revisiting work.   Melissa: That's right.   Donika: And that was not a thing that Melissa was doing before we met, which feels confusing to me. Because I am a person who really likes to revisit. She was buying more books when we met, and now she uses the library more, and that feels like really exciting. That feels like a triumph on my part. I'm like…   Annie: That is a victory. Yeah.   Donika: …with the public services.   Melissa; Both of these examples really allude to like this deep, fundamental sort of capitalistic set of habits that I have, where I… like there's like this weird implicit desire to try to read as many books as possible before I perish, and also to hoard them, I guess. And I'm very happy to have been influenced out of that.   Annie: Well it's hard not to think—I think about that tweet like once a week that's like you have an imaginary bookshelf, and there are a limited amount of books on that you can read before you die, and that like troubles me every day.   Melissa: Yeah it's so fucked up. (12:22) I don't want that. It's already in my head. I feel like I was born with that in my head, and I'm trying to get free.   Lito: Same. Serious book FOMO, like…   Donika: There are so many books y'all.   Lito: I know. It's not possible.   Donika: And, it's like, there are more and more every year.   Annie: Well, uh Donika tell us about Melissa.   Donika: Oh Melissa As she has already explained we have a lot of fun It's a funny household. She's hilarious. Um, and also she's a writer of great integrity, which you know I'm sitting on the couch reading Nora Roberts, and she's like in her office hammering away at essays, and I don't know what's going on in there. I'm very nosy. I'm a deeply nosy person. Like, I just I want to know like what's going on. I want to know the whole history, and it's really amazing to be with someone who is like here it is.   Annie: How did you all meet?   Donika: (13:20) mere moments after Trump was elected in 2016. I was in great despair. I was living in Western New York. I was teaching at a small Catholic university. Western New York is very conservative. It's very red. And I was in this place and I was like, this place is not my place. This place is not for me. And I was feeling very alone. And Melissa had written an essay that came out shortly after about teaching creative writing at a private institution in a red county. And I was like, oh, she gets it, she understands.   I started, I just like looked for everything. I looked for like everything that she had written. I read it, I watched the TED talk. I don't know if y'all know about the TED talk. There was a TED talk. I watched the TED talk. I was like, she's cute. I read Whip Smart. I followed her on Twitter. I developed a crush, and I did nothing else. So this is where I pass the baton. So I did all of that.   Melissa: I loved Bestiaries, and I love the cover. The cover of her book is from this medieval bestiary. And so I just bought it, and I read it. And I just had that experience that I described before where I was just like, "Oh, fuck. Like this writer and I have something very deep in common." And I wrote her. I DMed her on Twitter.   Sometimes I obscure this part of the story because I want it to appear like I sent her a letter by raven or something. But actually, I slid into her DMs, and I just was like, "hey, I loved your book. If you ever come to New York and want help setting up a reading, like I curate lots of events, da da da." And I put my email in. And not five minutes later, refreshed my Gmail inbox, and there was an email from Donika, and…   Donika: I was like, "Hi. Hello. It's me."   Annie: So you agree with this timeline, Donika, right? Like, it was within five minutes.   Donika: Yeah, it was very fast. And I think if I hadn't read everything that I could get my hands on that Melissa had written, I may have been a little bit slower off the mark. It wasn't romantic. Like the connection, I wasn't like, oh, this is someone who like I want to (15:41) strike up a romantic relationship with, it really was the work. Like I just respected the work so much.   I mean, I did have a crush, like that was real, but I have crushes on lots of people, like that sort of flows in and out, but that often is a signifier of like, oh, this person will be my friend. And I was still married at the time and trying to figure out, like that relationship was ending. It was coming to a quick close that felt slow. Like it was dragging a little bit for lots of reasons.   But then once it was clear to me that I was getting divorced, Melissa and I continued writing to each other like for the next few months. Yeah. And then I was like, oh, I'm getting divorced. I was like, I'm getting divorced. And then suddenly the emails were very different. From both of us. It wasn't different.   Melissa: There had been no romantic strategy or intent, you know, and I think which, which was a really great way to, we really started from a friendship.   Annie: And sounds like a courtship really. I mean, it kind of is an old fashion.   Melissa: Yeah, in some way, it became that. I think it became that. But I think it was, I mean, the best kind of courtship begins as a, as a friendly courtship, you know what I mean? Where it was about sort of mutual artistic respect and curiosity and just interest. And it wasn't defined yet, like, what sort of mood that interest would take for a while, you know?   Lito: So how do you seduce each other on and off the page?   Donika: That's a great question.   Melissa: That is a great question.   Donika: I am not good at seduction. So that is not a skill set that is available to me. It has never been available.   Lito: I do not believe that.   Annie: I know. I'm also in disbelief out here, really.   Melissa: No one believes it, but she insists.   Annie: I feel like that's part of the game, is my feeling, but it is not.   Melissa: It's not. Here's the thing I will say is that like Donika, I've thought a lot about this and we've talked a lot about this because I balked at that statement as well. It's like Donika is seductive. Like there are qualities about her that are very seductive, but she does not seduce people. You know what I mean? Like she doesn't like turn on the charisma and shine it at you like a hypnotist. Like that's not… (18:08) that's not her form of seduction, but I will say…   I can answer that question in terms of like, I think in terms of the work, since we've been talking about that, like in a literary way, both in her own work, like the quality, like just someone who's really good at what they do is fucking sexy, you know? Like when I was looking for like a little passage before this interview, I was just like, "ah, this is so good." Like it's so attractive when someone is really, really good at their craft. right? Especially when it's a crop that you share.   Donika: So Melissa does have the ability to turn on what she has written about, which I think is really funny. Like she like she has like, she has a very strong gaze. It's very potent. And one of my gifts is to disrupt that and be like, what are you doing with your eyes? And so like, when I think about that in the work, when I'm reading her work, and I'm in like its deepest thrall, it is that intensity of focus that really like pulls me in and keeps me in. She's so good at making a grand statement.   Melissa: I was just gonna bring that up.   Donika: Oh, I think she and I like often get to, we arrive at sort of similar places, but she gets there from the grand statement, and I get there from the granular statement, like it's a very narrow sort of path. And then Melissa's like, "every love is a destroyer." I was like, whoa, every one? And there's something really compelling about that mode of— because it's earnest, and it's backed up by the work that she's written. I would never think to say that.   Melissa: I have a question for you, lit friend. Do you think you would be less into me if I weren't? Because I think for a nonfiction writer, I'm pretty obsessed with sentences. It's writing sentences that makes, that's the thing I love most about writing. It's like where the pleasure is for me. So I'm a pretty poetically inclined nonfiction writer. If I were less so, do you think that would be less seductive to you as a reader or a lit friend?   Donika: I mean, that's like asking me to imagine like, "so, what if… (20:30) water wasn't wet?" I just like, I can't like, I can't imagine. I do think the pleasure of the sentence is so intrinsic to like, I think there's something in the, in your impulse at the sentence level. That means that you're just careful. You're not rushing. You're not rushing us through an experience or keeping us in there and focused. And it's just it's tricky to imagine, or almost impossible to imagine what your work would look like if that weren't the impulse.   Lito: Yeah, I think that's an essential part of your style in some ways, that you're taking that time.   Melissa: Mm-hmm.    Annie: And how you see the world. Like I don't even think you would get to those big revelations Donika's talking about without it.   Melissa: Yeah. Right. I don't, yeah, I don't think I would either. We'll be right back.   Lito (21:19) Hey Lit Fam, Lit Friends is taking a break for the holiday. We hope you'll join us for our next episode with our guests, Ian Lee and Edmund White on January 16th. Till then, may your holiday be lit, your presents be numerous, and your 2024 be filled with joy and peace. If you'd like to show us some love, please take a moment now to follow, subscribe, rate, and review the LitFriends Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just a few moments of your time will help us so much. Big hugs to you and yours. Thank you for listening. And thank you for making season one a big success!   Annie: (22:05) Welcome back.   Lito: I've noticed that both of you, you know, you have your genres that you work in, but within that you're experimenting a lot with form and structure. Does anything of that come from being queer? I guess it's a question about queering forms of literature, and what that has to do also with the kinds of friendships that queer people have, and if that's different, maybe. So I guess I'm asking to connect form with queerness and friendship.   Melissa: That's a beautiful question. I think, and I'm starting with thinking about my relationship to form, which has been one of inheriting some scripts for forms. This is what an essay should look like. This is what plot structure looks like. This is how you construct a narrative. And sort of taking those for granted a little bit, and then pretty early on, understanding the limitations of those structures and the ways that they require that I contort myself and my content such that it feels like a perversion or betrayal of sort of what I'm dealing with, right? And so the way I characterize my trajectory, the trajectory of my relationship to form has been sort of becoming conscious of those inherited forms, and then pushing the boundaries of them and modifying them and distorting them and adding things to them and figuring out, letting my work sort of teach me what form it rests most easily in and is most transparent in. And I suspect that my relationship to friendship and particularly queer friendship mimics that.   Donika: Yeah, that sounds right to me. And I'm reminded of Denise Levertov has this essay titled "On the Function of the Line." And in it, she presents an argument that closed forms, received forms, are based on a kind of assumption of resolution, and that free verse or open design, like in a poem, it shows evidence of the speaker's thinking.   (24:24) Right? So that where the line breaks, the speaker is pausing, right? To gather their thoughts or like a turn might happen that's unexpected that mimics the turns in thinking. And I really love that essay. Like that essay is one of my favorites. So when I think about my approach to form, I'm like, what is the shape that this poem is asking for? What is the shape that will do, that will help the poem do its best work? And not even like to be good, but just like to be true.   I really love the sonnet shape. Like it's one of my favorite shapes. And it's so interesting and exciting to use a shape that is based on like argumentative structure or a sense of resolution, to explore. Like to use that as an exploratory space, it feels like queering our, like my expectations of what the sonnet does. Like there's something about the box. If I bounce around inside that box, there's gonna be something that comes out of that, that I wouldn't necessarily have gotten otherwise, but it's not resolution. Like the point is not resolution.   And when I think about my relationships and my chosen family, in particular, and to some degree actually my given family, part of what I'm thinking about is how can I show up and care and what does care look like in this relationship and how can I make room to be cared for? And that's so hard, like being cared for is so much more alien to me than, like, as a concept, like I feel like very anxious about it. I'm like, "am I asking for too much?" And like over and over again, my chosen family is like, "no, it's not too much. Like we, we got each other."   Melissa: I think particularly for queer people, we understand that it doesn't preclude romance or healthy kinds of dependency or unhealthy kinds of dependency, you know, that all of the things that happen in a very deep love relationship happen inside of friendship, where I think sort of like straight people and dominant culture have been like, "oh, no, like friendship isn't the site of like great romance or painful divorce or abuse." And queer people understand that all of those things happen within relationships that we call friendships.   Annie: (26:46) Yeah, I mean, I'm hearing you both talk about kind of queer survival and joy and even, Donika, what you were saying about having to adjust to being cared for as a kind of, you know, that's a sort of, to me, it's a sort of like a survivor's stance in the world. One of the things that I love about my kinship with Lito as, you know, my queer lit friend and, you know, brother from another mother is that he holds that space for me and I, you know, vice versa.   Even thinking about vulnerability, I think you both wield vulnerability as a tool of subversion too, right? And again, Lito and I are both creating projects right now that require a kind of rawness on the page. I'm about to publish a memoir called Sex with a Brain Injury, so I'm very consciously thinking about how we define vulnerability, what kind of work it does to reshape consciousness in the collective. And the ways that you each write about trauma helps us understand it as an act of reclamation, you know, power rather than powerlessness. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what is or what can be transformative about the confessional and maybe even more to the point, what does your lit friend teach you about vulnerability?   Melissa: (28:06) Oh, God, what doesn't she teach me about vulnerability? It's interesting because like you're correct that vulnerability is like very central to my work and to the like lifelong project of my work, and also like there's literally nothing on earth I would like to avoid more. And I don't think that is visible in my work, right? Because my work is the product of counteracting that set of instincts, which I must do to survive because the part of me that wants to avoid vulnerability, its end point is like literally death for me.   It is writing for me often starts from like kind of a pragmatic practice. I don't start like feeling my feelings. I write to get to my feelings and sometimes that doesn't happen until like after a book is published sometimes. You know like it's really interesting lately I've been confronting some feelings in like a really deep way that I think I have gotten access to from writing Girlhood, which came out in 2021. And it's like I had to sort of lay it all out, understand what happened, redefine my role in it and everyone else's. And I definitely had feelings while I was writing it. But like the feelings that Donika refers to as the big boss, like the deepest feelings about it. Like I, I feel like I'm only really getting. to it now.   My relationship to vulnerability, it's just like, it's a longitudinal process, you know? And there's no one who's taught me about that and how to be sort of like gentle and patient within that and to show up for it than Donika.   And I'm just thinking of like, you know, starting from pretty early in our relationship, she was working on the poems in The Renunciations, and over the years of our early, the early years of our relationship, she was confronting some childhood, some really profound childhood trauma. And she was doing that in therapy. And then there were like pieces of that work that she had to do in the poems. And I just watched her not force it. And when it was time, she like created the space to do the work. And like, I wasn't (30:35) there for that. I don't think anyone else really could have been there for that. And just like showing up for that work.   And then like the long tail of like publishing a book and having conversations with people and the way that it changes one's relationship and like the act of the vulnerability—achieved feels like the wrong word—but the vulnerability like expressed or found in the writing process, how that is just like a series of doorways and a hallway that maybe it never terminates. Maybe it doesn't even turn into death. I don't know. You know, but I've just seen her show up for that process with like a patience and a tenderness for herself at every age that I find incredibly challenging. And it's been super instructive for me.   Donika: Ooh. I, I'm, it makes me really happy to know that's your experience of like being like in like shared artistic space together. I think I go to poetry to understand, to help myself understand what it is that I'm holding and what it is that I wanna put down. Like that's what the poems are for. You know, like the act of writing helps me sort out what I need and what I wanna put down because narrative is so powerful. It feels like the one place where I can say things that are really hard, often because I've already said them in therapy.   Right? So then it's like, I can then explore what having said those hard things means in my life or how it sits in my life. And what Melissa shows me is that one can revise. I know I've said this like a few times, but that one can have a narrative. Like I think about reading Whipsmart and the story that she has about herself as a child in Whipsmart, and then how that begins to change a bit in Abandon Me. And then in Girlhood, it's really disrupted. And there is so much more tenderness there, I think. It looks really hard. Like, honestly, that joint looks hard because I might be in a poem, but I'm in it for like, like we're in it, like if I were to read it out loud for like a minute and a half.   Melissa: (33:50) It's interesting hearing you talk. I wonder if this is true. I think I'm hearing that it is true. And I think that's where it's with my experience that you often get to the feelings like in therapy or wherever, and then write the poems as more of a sort of emotional, but like also cognitive and kind of systemic and like a way of like making sense of it or putting it in context. And I think very much I, there'll be like deeply submerged feelings that emerge only as like impulses or something, you know, but I experience writing— I don't that often feel intense emotion while I'm writing. I think it's why that is writing is almost always the first place that I encounter my own vulnerability or that I say the like unspeakable thing or the thing that I have been unable to say. I often write it and then I can talk to my therapist about it or then I can talk to Donika about it.   And I think I can't. I'm too afraid or it feels like too much to feel the feelings while I'm writing. So I sort of experience it as a cognitive or like intellectual and creative exercise. And then once I understand it, sometime in the next five years, I feel the feelings.   Annie: Do you feel like it's a kind of talking to yourself or like talking outside of the world? Like what is it in that space that does that for you?   Melissa: Yeah, I do. I mean, it's like. Talking outside the world makes more sense to me than talking to myself. I mean, it is talking to myself, right? It's a conversation with myself, but it's removed from the context of me in my daily life. That's why it's possible. Within my daily life, I'm too connected to other people and my own internal pressures and just like the busy, superficial part of me that's like driving a lot of my days. I have to get away from her in order to do that work.   And so the writing really happens in a kind of separate space and feels like it is not, it has a kind of privacy that I don't experience in any other way in my life, where I really have built or found a space where I am never thinking about what other people think of me, and I'm not imagining a skeptical reader. (35:18) It is really like this weird spiritual, emotional, creative, intellectual space that is just separate from all of that, where I can sort of think and be curious freely.   And I think I created that space or found it really early on because I was, even as a kid, I was a person who was like so concerned with the people around me, with the adults around me, with what performances were expected of me. And being a person who was like very deeply thinking and feeling, I was like, well, there's no room for that here. So I need to like find somewhere else to do it. And so I think writing became that for me way before I thought about being a writer.   Lito: That's so fascinating to me. I think that's so different than how I work or Donika works or a lot of people I know. We'll be right back.   Lito: (36:26) Back to the show.   So this question is for both of you really, but it just makes me wonder then like, what is the role for emotion, but in particular anger? How does that like, when things get us angry, sometimes that motivates us to do something, right? So if you're not being inspired by an emotion to write, you're writing and then finding it, how does anger work as not only a tool for survival, but maybe a path towards personhood and freedom?   Donika: Oh, I was just thinking, I can't write out of that space, the space of anger. It took me a long time to get in touch with anger as a feeling. That took a really long time because in my family, in my given family, the way that people expressed anger was so dangerous that I felt that I didn't want to occupy those spaces. I didn't want to move emotionally into that, into that space if that was what it looked like. And it took me a long time to figure out how to be angry. And I'm still not sure that I'm great at it. Because I think often I'm moving quickly to like what's under that feeling. And often what's under my feelings of being angry, often, not always, is being hurt, feeling hurt. And I can… write into exploring what that hurt is, because I know how to do that with some tenderness and some care.   Melissa: I feel similarly, which is interesting, because we've never talked about this, I don't think. But anger is also a feeling that I think, for very different reasons, when I was growing up… I mean, I think just like baseline being socialized as a girl dissuaded me from expressing anger or even from feeling it, because where would that go?   But I also think in the particular environment that I was in, I understood pretty early that my expressions of anger would be like highly injurious to the people around me and that it would be better if I found another way to express those things. I think my compulsive inclinations have been really useful in that way. And it's taken me a lot of my adult life to sort of… (38:44) take my anger or as Donika said, you know, like anger for me almost always factors down to something that is largely powerlessness, you know, to sort of not take the terror and fury of powerlessness and express it through like ultimately self harming means.   Writing can be a way for me to arrive at like justifiable anger and to sort of feel that and let that move through me or to be like, oh, that was unjust. I was powerless in that situation. You know? Yeah, it has helped me in that way. But like, if I'm really being honest, I think I exhaust myself with exercise. And that's how I mostly deal with my feelings of anger.   Annie: Girl.   Melissa: Yeah, there's also a way I will say that like, I do think it actually comes out in my work in some ways. Like there is like a very direct, not people-pleasing vibe and tone in my work that is genuine, but that I almost never have in my life. Like maybe a little bit as a professor, but like    When Donika met me, she was like, "Oh… like you're just like this little gremlin puppy person. You're not like this intense convicted former dominatrix." You know, which is, I express it in my writing because it is a space where I'm not worried about placating or pleasing really. It's a space where I'm, I am almost solely interested in what I actually think.   Donika: I was just thinking about like the beginning of, I think it's "Wild America," when you talk about like not cleaning your room, Melissa. Because you didn't, like when you were a kid, right? It was like you cleaned your room when you wanted to appear good, but that didn't matter to you when you were alone in your room. Like you could get lost in a book or you could, you know, like just be inside yourself alone when you were alone in your room. And that's one of my favorite passages that you read. Like I'm always sort of like mouthing along, like it's a song.   Melissa: (40:57) I'm just interested and I really love the sort of conception of like a girl's room as a potential space that sort of maps on to the way I described the writing space where it's just like a space where other, where the gaze of others, or the gaze that we're taught to please like can be kept out to some extent. And just like, you know, that isn't true, obviously for like lots and lots and lots of girls, but just that there is an impetus for us to create or invent or designate a space where that is true.   Lito: Yeah, I think that's what she's up to in "A Room of One's Own."   Annie: It makes me think of like girls' rooms as like kind of also these reductive spaces, like they all have to have pink or whatever, but then you like carve out a secret space for yourself in that room, which I think is what you're talking about with your writing.   Donika: Oh, I was just thinking about what happens when you don't have a room like that, cause I didn't, like I absolutely did not have a room that was… inviolable in some way or that like really felt like I could close the door. But writing became a place where that work could happen and where those explorations could happen and where I could do whatever I want and I had control over so many aspects of the work. And I hesitated because I was saying I didn't have that much control over the content.   Like I might think, oh, I'm gonna write a poem about this or a poem about that. And as is true with most writing, the poems are so much smarter and reveal so much more than I might have intended, but I could like shape the box. There are just like so many places to have control in a poem, like there's so many mechanisms to consider where like when Melissa was first sharing like early work with me, I would get so nervous because I would wanna move a comma.   Because in a poem, like that's a big deal, moving somebody's commas around, changing the punctuation. And she was like, "it doesn't matter."   Melissa: I would get nervous because she would be like, "well, I just have one note, but it's like, kind of big." And I would be like, "oh, fuck, I failed." And she would be like,    Donika: "What's going on with these semicolons?"   Melissa: She'd be like, "I just, these semicolons."   Annie: You know, hearing you both talk about (43:20) how you show up for one another as readers, right? In addition to like romantic partners. I mean, we do have the sense, and this can be true of all marriages, queer or otherwise, where like we as readers have a pretty superficial understanding of what you kind of each bring to the table or how you create this protective space or really see one another. I imagine that you've saved yourselves, but I'm curious about to what extent this relationship may have also been a way to save you or subvert relationships that have come before. And yet at the same time, we've asked this question of other lit friends too, which is, you know, what about competition between lit friends? And what does that look like in a marriage? What is a good day versus a bad day?   Donika: I mean, we could be here for years talking about that first question. And so I'm gonna turn to the second part to talk about competition, which is much easier to handle.   I feel genuinely and earnestly so excited at the recognition that Melissa has received. Part of what was really exciting for me about the beginning of our relationship that continues to be exciting is that, is getting to watch someone be truly mid-career and navigate that with integrity. It feels like such a good model, for how to be a writer.   I mean, she's much more forward-facing than I would ever want to be. But I think in terms of just thinking about like, what is the work? How, like, where is the integrity? Like, it's just, it's always so, so forward and it feels really grounding for me and us in the house, so it's always big cheers in here. It helps that we write in different genres. I think that's super helpful.   Melissa: I think it's absolutely key. Yeah.   Donika: It's not, I mean, I think, and that we have very different measures of ambition. I think those two things together are really, really helpful.   But I've read everything that Melissa has written, I think. (45:38) There might be like a few little, I mean, I've read short story, like that short, there was like a short story from like shortly, I think after you, like before you were in your MFA program, maybe.   Melissa: Oh my God. What short story?   Donika: I can't, I'll find it. And show it to you later.   Melissa: Is it about that little plant?   Donika: No, no, it might've been an essay. I'm not sure.   Annie: I love this. This is sort of hot breaking news on LitFriends.   Donika: It's like, I've just like, I did a deep Google dive. I was like, I want to read everything and it's, it feels really exciting.   Melissa: You know, I've dated writers before, and it was a different situation. And I think even if I hadn't, even before I ever did, I thought, that seems unlikely to work. Because even though there are lots of like obvious ways that it could be great, the competition just seemed like such a poison dart that it would be really hard to avoid because writers are competitive, and I'm competitive. And maybe it would have been harder if we were younger or something.   And certainly if we were in the same genre, I think actually, who knows? Maybe it would be possible if we were in the same genre, but it would require a little more care. Even if for some reason we would never publish again, we would keep writing. It just like it functions in our lives in similar ways. And it's like a practice that we came to, you know, I have a more hungry ambition or have historically. And I think our relationship is something that helps me keep the practice at the center because we're constantly talking about it. And I'm constantly observing Donika's relationship to her work. So it really hasn't felt very relevant. Like it's kind of shocking to me how, how little impact competition or comparing has in our relationship. It's really like not even close to one of the top notes of things that might create conflict for us, you know, and I'm so grateful for that. And so happy to have like underestimated what's possible when you have a certain level of intimacy and respect and sort of compatibility with someone.   Lito: We'll be right back.   Annie: (47:57) Welcome back. Well, then I'm wondering, you know, you both have had some like incredible successes in the last few years. And I'm wondering if conversely, you've been able to show up for one another in moments of high pressure or exposure, or, you know, having to confront the world, having been vulnerable on the page in the ways you have been.   Melissa: Donika was not planning on having a book launch for The Renunciations.   Donika: What's a book launch? Like, why do people do that?   Annie: Listen, mine's going to be a dance party, Donika. So…   Melissa: And I made, meanwhile, like when I published Abandon Me, I had a giant dance party that I had like several costume changes for during. But I remember feeling pretty confident about making a strong case multiple times for her to have a book launch for The Renunciations. And also like having a lot of respect and like tenderness watching her navigate what it meant to take work that vulnerable and figure out how to like speak for it and talk about it and like present it to the world. Parts of her would have preferred to just let the book completely speak for itself out there.    Donika: But you were right it was a good time.   Melissa: I was right.   Donika: Because like when Melissa's so when Girlhood came out it was like, that was still the time of like so many virtual events. And it was just like, I think that first week there was like something every day that week, like there was an event every day that week. And now, now like, again, I had to be talked into having a book launch. So I own this. Um, but I was like, Ooh, why, why would you do that? Oh, yeah. Four?   Melissa: This is definitely one of the ways that she and I are like diametrically opposed, and therefore I think, helpful to each other in sort of like creating a kind of tension that can be uncomfortable but is mostly good for both of us to be sort of pulled closer to the middle.   Donika: But my favorite part of that is then hearing you give advice to your friends who are very similar and be like, "whoa, you did too much. You put too many things on the calendar."     Melissa: (50:15) You know, some people would say that that's hypocrisy, but I actually think, I have a real dubious like position and thinking about hypocrisy because I am an expert in overdoing things. And so I think I speak from, I am like the voice of Christmas future. You know what I mean? I'm like, let me speak to you from the potential future that you are currently planning with your publicist. And like, it's not pretty and it doesn't feel good. And it's not, it has not delivered the feeling that you're imagining when you're scheduling all those events.   Annie: I can appreciate this. And I appreciate Donika's kind of role, this particular role in a relationship, because sometimes I just have to go see Leto and literally just lay on Lito and be like, stop me from doing anymore.   Melissa: I know, I know.   Lito: You and Sara are like super overachievers. I have to be like, "can you calm down?"   Annie: We do too much.   Lito: Way too much. What would you like to see your lit friend make or create next?   Donika: I got two answers to this. The first one is the Cape Cod lesbian mystery. I'm ready. You know, we got, I've offered so much assistance as a person who will never write prose. Um, but I got notes and ideas. The second one is, uh, a micro essay collection titled Dogs I Have Loved. Cause I think it would be a New York Times bestseller.   Lito: Oh, I love that.   Donika: I know.   Lito: Speaking of, who's the little gremlin puppy there?   Donika: Oh, yeah, that's Chuck. Chuck is a 15-year-old chihuahua. I've had him since he was a puppy.   Annie: Is Chuck like a nickname, or is that just, it's just Chuck?   Donika: It's just Chuck.   Lito: I love that.   Melissa: His nickname is Charles sometimes. One of his nicknames is Charles, but his full name is Chuck.   Melissa: OK, so I would say, I mean, my first thought at this question was like, I want Donika to keep doing exactly what she's been doing? As far as I can tell, she doesn't have a lot of other voices getting in the way of that process. My second thought is that I'm really interested. I've never heard her talk. She has no interest in writing prose of any kind. She is like deeply wedded to poetry. But I have heard her talk more recently about potential collaborations with (52:40) other artists, visual artists and other writers. And I would, I'm really excited to see what comes out of that space.   Lito: Would you all ever collaborate beyond your marriage?   Annie: I could see you all doing a craft book together.   Melissa: I feel like we could make like a chapbook that had prose and poems in it that were responding to a shared theme. I could definitely see that.   Donika: I really thought you were gonna say Love Poems for Melissa Febos, that's what you wanted to see next.   Melissa: I mean, I already know that that's on deck, so I don't... I mean, it's in, it's on the docket. It's on deck. Yeah. So…   Lito: Those sonnets, get to work on the sonnets.   Donika: Such a mess.   Melissa: This is real, you think, this is not, like, a conversation of the moment. This is…   Annie: Oh no, we can, this is history.   Donika: "Where's my century of sonnets?" she says.   Lito (53:33) What is your first memory?   Donika: Dancing?   Melissa: Donika telling me I'm pretty.   Annie (54:15.594) Who or what broke your heart first?   Melissa: Maddie, our dog.   Donika: Kerri Strug, 1996 Olympics. Vault.   Lito: Atlanta.   Donika: The Vault final. Yeah. Heartbreaking.   Lito: Who would you want to be lit friends with from any time in history, living or dead?   Donika: I just thought Gwendolyn Brooks. I'm gonna go with that.   Lito: I love Gwendolyn Brooks.   Donika: Oh yeah.   Melissa: My first thought is Baldwin.   Donika: It's a great party. We're at a great party.   Melissa: I just feel like I would be like, "No, James!" all the time.   Melissa: (54:30) Or like Truman Capote.   Lito: It'd be wild.   Donika: Messy. So messy.   Annie: What's your favorite piece of music?   Melissa: Oh my god, these questions are crazy! "Hallelujah"?   Donika: Oh god, there's an aria from Diana Damraus' first CD. She's a Soprano. And it's a Mozart aria, and I don't know where it's from, and I can't tell you the name because it's in Italian and I don't speak Italian, but that joint is exceptional. So that's what I'm gonna go with. Oh God, just crying in the car.   Lito: If you could give any gift to your lit friend without limitations, what would you give them?   Donika: Just like gold chains. So many gold chains. Yeah! If I could have a gold chain budget, it'd be a lot.   Annie: (55:23) Donika, we can do this.   Lito: Achievable.   Donika: I mean, yeah. Yeah.   Lito: Bling budget.   Donika: That's the first thing I thought.   Annie: Love it.   Donika: Just like gold, just thin gold chains, thick gold chains.   Melissa: I'm going to go with that, then, and say an infinite sneaker budget.   Lito: Yes. Oh, I want a shoe room. (55:50) That'd be awesome.   Melissa: We need two shoe rooms in this house, or like one. Or we just need to have a whole living room that's just for shoes.   Donika: I just like there's just like one closet that's just like for shoes. Like that's what we need.   Lito: That's great.   Donika: Yeah, but it's actually a room. Yes. With like a sorting system, it's like computer coded.   Annie: Soft lighting. That's our show.   Annie & Lito: Thanks for listening.   Lito: We'll be back next week with our guests Yiyun Li and Edmund White.   Annie: Find us on all your socials @LitFriendsPodcast.   Lito: Don't forget to reach out and tell us about the love affair of you and your LitFriend.   Annie: I'm Annie Liontas.   Lito: And I'm Lito Velázquez. Thank you to our production squad. Our show is edited by Justin Hamilton.   Annie: Our logo was designed by Sam Schlenker.   Lito: Lizette Saldana is our marketing director.   Annie: Our theme song was written and produced by Robert Maresca.   Lito: And special thanks to our show producer, Toula Nuñez.   Annie: This was LitFriends, Episode Three.    

Barbara Ras was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and has lived in Costa Rica, Colombia, California, and Texas. She is the author of The Last Skin (2010), winner of the best poetry award from the Texas Institute of Letters; One Hidden Stuff (2006); and Bite Every Sorrow (1998), which was selected by C.K. Williams for the Walt Whitman Award. Of Bite Every Sorrow, C.K. Williams wrote, “the book is a demonstration of what might be called a morality of inclusiveness, a Whitmanesque commitment to the wisdom of the individual case rather than the general type. And along with so much rich soul-work, there is a remarkable poetic skill. Ras structures poems with a zaniness and an unpredictable cunning, and her verbal expertise and lucidity are as bright and surprising as her knowledge of the world is profound.”Ras is the recipient of numerous awards including the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. She has taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Currently she directs the Trinity University Press in San Antonio, Texas. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

In conversation with poet Phillip B. Williams Airea D. Matthews is the 2022–23 Philadelphia Poet Laureate and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College. Her collection Simulacra won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poets, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and VQR, among other journals. Matthews' other honors include a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Addressing themes of income inequality, commodification, and conventional economic theories, Bread and Circus combines poetry, prose, and imagery to tell an intimate story about the author and her family. Phillip B. Williams is the Whiting Award-winning author of Thief in the Interior and Mutiny. A recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Whiting Award, he has also received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently teaches at Bennington College and the Randolph College low-residency MFA. (recorded 6/1/2023)

Episode 137 Notes and Links to Vanessa Angélica Villarreal 's Work       On Episode 137 of The Chills at Will Podcast, Pete welcomes Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and the two discuss, among other topics, Vanessa's upbringing, her bond with her beloved grandmother, religion and indigenous traditions in her family and in her communities, punishing and overbearing institutions that oppressed her as a student, finding solace in books and poetry and bands, and ideas both historical and personal that inform her standout poetry collection.    Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Oxford American, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is working on a poetry and nonfiction collection while raising her son. Her essay collection, CHUECA, is forthcoming from Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2023. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid. Buy Beast Meridian   Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's Website   Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's Wikipedia Page   Review of Beast Meridian for Pleiades Magazine   At about 2:35, Vanessa talks about beginning to read at a young age, and how her dad's music compelled her to read liner notes and still informs her writing   At about 3:30, Vanessa talks about childhood bilingualism and some early writing based on the loss of her beloved grandmother    At about 4:40, Vanessa describes the resultant grief and rebellion after her grandmother's death, as well as how her mistreatment in school led her to be part of a backwards educational/carceral experience   At about 7:35, Vanessa discusses grunge and other 90s music-”angsty” and “against the Man”-and how they led her on a path to poetry   At about 8:30, Vanessa describes Paul Celan as an inspiration for critiquing language in rebellious and “seek the haunted”   At about 9:35, Vanessa talks about how her poetry career took a pause as she began to work long hours at an early age   At about 11:20, Pete cites the famous quote about “art being a luxury” and Angelica adds that she considers it a birthright”   At about 12:30, Pete and Vanessa fanboy and girl about the previously-mentioned musicians, and Vanessa cites these creatives as “Romantics” and writers of beautiful and “strange” lyrics   At about 15:00, Vanessa responds to Pete's questions about where her musical/lyrical sensibilities were born, and she expands on ideas of repetition and prayer derived from her father   At about 16:50, Vanessa speaks of “writing toward the body” in a lot of her work, “creating an understanding of the body”; she compares this writing to a chord change   At about 18:20, Vanessa highlights her father as “an intuitive composer” and his facility with sound and writing   At about 21:20, Vanessa discusses inspirational and formative writers in her writing journey, including Celan, Asa Berger, Harmony Holliday, The Black Root Collective, and Jennifer Tamayo   At about 25:10, Vanessa discusses the implications and subtleties of nomenclature around Chicanx/Latinx/Mexican-American identities    At about 26:30, Pete asks Vanessa about the implications of the term pocha and Malinche and ideas of women as traitors is discussed    At about 30:15, Vanessa gives background on the famous quote by José Vasconselos    At about 33:10, The two begin discussing Beast Meridian; Pete compliments Vanessa's original use of verbs   At about 34:40, Pete's question about the poet as speaker leads Vanessa to discuss background for the poetry collection and the ways in which she approached the pages and with what questions in mind   At about 38:15, Vanessa discusses implications of her epigraphs, including ideas put forth by Frantz Fanon and Gloria Anzaldua's ideas of Nepantla    At about 41:35, Vanessa cites Christopher Soto's work discussing implications for Nepantla   At about 42:40, Pete references the collection's first poem   At about 43:40, Vanessa reads the poem “Angélica: An Elegy” and describes the importance of the poem ending with a colon (:)   At about 45:40, The two discuss ideas of Malinche and her contemporary reimagining and Malinche's connections to a poem in the collection   At about 47:00, Vanessa cites femicides in Tijuana and among indigenous women and “Irish Murder Ballads” as stimulus for her collection   At about 50:15, Vanessa and Pete discuss the myriad meanings of her connected “assimilation poems”: connections to Malinche, inversion, Spanglish, the use of footnotes, comparisons of “Girl” by Kincaid, strong metaphors, etc.      At about 53:20, Vanessa gives her definition of “assimilation” and speaks of ideas of identity/agency   At about 57:40, Pete points out beautiful and memorable lines from Vanessa's work, especially regarding the ideas connected to “parallax”   At about 1:00:20, Vanessa remarks that “100% on her mind” was generational trauma and ideas of ancestral memory as she wrote the collection   At about 1:02:20, Pete wonders about the animals and mythology used in Part II and how they relate to real people in Vanessa's life   At about 1:05:40, The two discuss the salient theme of loss in the collection, with a special emphasis on “Dissociative States”      You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode.  This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form. The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.    Please tune in for Episode 138 with Miguel Valerio. Prof. Valerio earned his PhD from The Ohio State University. His research and teaching focus on the African diaspora in the literature and culture of the Iberian world from the late medieval period to the present. His dissertation focused on black cultural agency vis-à-vis religious confraternities and public festivals in the early modern Iberian Atlantic, particularly colonial Mexico City and Bahia, Brazil. His work has appeared in Afro-Hispanic Review, Confraternitas, and the edited volume Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas. He is currently completing his first book, The Black Kings and Queens of Colonial Mexico City: Identity, Performance, and Power, 1539-1640. The episode will air on August 19. 

Benjamin Garcia's first collection, THROWN IN THE THROAT, won the National Poetry Series and the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York's Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College's low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in: AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. His video poem “Ode to the Peacok” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum's website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/AIDS. Copyright © 2018 by Benjamin Francis. This poem first appeared in Nimrod International.  Text of today's poem and more details about our program can be found at: deerfieldlibrary.org/queerpoemaday/ Find books from participating poets in our library's catalog.  Queer Poem-a-Day is directed by poet and teacher Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Deerfield Public Library. Music for this second year of our series is the first movement, Schéhérazade, from Masques, Op. 34, by Karol Szymanowski, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by generous donations from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library and the Deerfield Fine Arts Commission. Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language. 

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (Graywolf), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly's poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award.  A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, she has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos, and is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing. donikakelly.com Twitter: @officialdonika “Self Portrait as a Body, a Sea” was originally published in the Sewanee Review, 2017.  Text of today's poem and more details about our program can be found at: deerfieldlibrary.org/queerpoemaday/ Find books from participating poets in our library's catalog.  Queer Poem-a-Day is directed by poet and teacher Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Deerfield Public Library. Music for this second year of our series is the first movement, Schéhérazade, from Masques, Op. 34, by Karol Szymanowski, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by generous donations from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library and the Deerfield Fine Arts Commission. Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.

Walking. So simple, and yet putting one foot in front of the other is one of the most profound things you can do for your creative practice. In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with award-winning poet and painter Valencia Robin about how walking has inspired her practice. We bring in science to support what we all know intuitively–moving the body helps open the brain. And Robin (as we call her throughout the podcast) shares poems by contemporary poets and herself, too, that invoke the art of walking. Valencia Robin’s debut poetry collection, Ridiculous Light, is the winner of Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and was named one of the best poetry books of 2019 by Library Journal. Robin’s other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Emily Clark Balch Award, the Hocking Hills Power of Poetry Prize and fellowships from Cavé Cahnem, the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the University of Virginia, Bennington College and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A poetry instructor as well as a co-director of the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop, Robin has an MFA in Creative Writing from  the University of Virginia and an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan, where she also co-founded GalleryDAAS. Also a painter and curator, Robin’s visual work has been exhibited nationally and supported by the King-Chavez-Parks Future Faculty Fellowship and the Center for the Education of Women’s Margaret Towsley Fellowship.Valencia Robin’s websiteStanford study finds walking improves creativityRebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of WalkingRoss Gay, “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian”Ada Limón, “During the Impossible Age of Everyone” Valencia Robin, “After Graduate School” This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit emergingform.substack.com/subscribe

Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children's books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second book of poetry, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, came out in 2011, and her third book, Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin, appeared in 2016. Harrington's children's books have won many awards and citations, including a listing among Time magazine's top 10 children's books. Harrington has worked as a public librarian and now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois. For more, check out her website at: https://janiceharrington.com/ As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/ This Week's Prompt: Let's write a poem about one (or each!) of the 12 Jungian archetypes. The first archetype is “the artist.” Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem based on a classic novel. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Danez Smith (they/them) is a poet and educator most well known for their works highlighting the facets and intersections of their identity. Danez is genderqueer, they are "black in a political sense and in a racial sense" (from their TEDx Talk "Listen, dammit! Student voice are you listening?") and they are HIV positive. One of their most famous works is "Dear White America" in which they fantasize about leaving earth for a better, safer planet. They are the winner of many awards including the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Bookseller's Choice Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.

Danez Smith (they/them) is a poet and educator most well known for their works highlighting the facets and intersections of their identity. Danez is genderqueer, they are "black in a political sense and in a racial sense" (from their TEDx Talk "Listen, dammit! Student voice are you listening?") and they are HIV positive. One of their most famous works is "Dear White America" in which they fantasize about leaving earth for a better, safer planet. They are the winner of many awards including the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Bookseller's Choice Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.

Why do empty places sometimes lend themselves to reflection or contemplation? In this poem, a poet — describing herself as a nonbeliever — goes into a chapel to sit. In the corner there are some girls talking, there are stained glass windows, and the poet is at once at home in herself and far from the woman she loves. The high emptiness of the church seems to give a resting place for the emptiness she's feeling. While there's no resolution, the larger empty space offers a holding place for the poet.Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary, the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Donika has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic online, The Paris Review, and Foglifter. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Can words change us? Poetry can help us understand and appreciate the world around us. Poetry's strength lies in its ability to shed a sideways light on the world, so the truth sneaks up on you. Poetry can teach us how to live—it bares open the vulnerabilities of human beings so we can all relate to each other a little better.   Brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry, Atsuro Riley is the author of Heard-Hoard (2021), which McSweeney's called “The essential collection of our moment—what we've needed most without knowing it.” His first collection, Romey's Order  (2010), was the winner of the Whiting Writers' Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan says of Riley “he's pursuing something a lot more ambitious that has deeply to do with sacred properties of language or language that could cast a spell against harm.”  In his own words: “All the best old tale-tellers of my Carolina upbringing could play righteously upon their (many) Englishes, deft as fiddlers bowing the strings. How they could pierce you with a lyric phrasing; how crackerjack they were at conjuring—for maximum reverberation and haunt. To my ear, a poetry unkillable as kudzu. I aspire to their example in everything I write. At the same time, I hear the admonishment of the Japanese master Basho (1644–1694), echoing from my mother's side of the cultural ledger: — Is there any good in saying everything?—”  Each year the cathedral chooses a theme for inspiration and reflection, and in 2021 our theme is healing. Join Dean Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Riley about poetry and the healing power of words.  You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. Go to gracecathedral.org/givetograce or text Think to 76278. Thank you.    About the guest  Atsuro Riley is the author of Heard-Hoard (University of Chicago Press, 2021), winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Romey's Order  (University of Chicago Press, 2010), winner of the Whiting Writers' Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. His work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and the Wood Prize given by POETRY magazine. His poems have been anthologized in The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall, The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of POETRY Magazine, The Oxford Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Poems of the American South, The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets, Poems from Far and Wide, Vinegar and Char, Gracious, and Home: 100 Poems. Brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry, Riley lives in San Francisco.  About the host    The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner.   About The Forum   The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum's host, Malcolm Clemens Young, the dean of Grace Cathedral, and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world.  https://gracecathedral.org/forum/

Chris and Courtney sit down with Danez Smith to talk about Passion, Process, Pitfalls, and Poetry!  Danez Smith is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of “Homie” (Graywolf Press, 2020), "Don't Call Us Dead" (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award, and "[insert] boy" (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez's work has been featured widely including on Buzzfeed, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez has been featured as part of Forbes' annual 30 Under 30 list and is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. They are a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, IL and author of the book Thief in the Interior (Alice James 2016). A recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Whiting Award, he currently teaches at Bennington College and the Randolph College low-residency MFA. Twitter: PBW_POET Instagram: PBW_POET "Of Contour, Of Cadence" was originally published in Thief in the Interior (Alice James 2016). Phillip B. Williams' forthcoming book MUTINY: poems comes out from Penguin Poetry, Sept 7 2021.  Text of today's poem and more details about our program can be found at: deerfieldlibrary.org/queerpoemaday/ Queer Poem-a-Day is directed by poet and teacher Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Deerfield Public Library. Music for our series is from Excursions Op. 20, Movement 1, by Samuel Barber, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by a generous donation from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library. Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.

Donika Kelly is the author of THE RENUNCIATIONS (Graywolf 2021) and BESTIARY (Graywolf). BESTIARY is the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The collection was also long listed for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Donika has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic online, The Paris Review, and Foglifter. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing. For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Loosen up and just not have answers sometimes to feel through things.”- Su Hwang I'm so excited! Today I have a very special guest, Su Hwang! Su Hwang is a poet, activist, stargazer, and the author of Bodega (Milkweed Editions), which received the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and was named a finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop AND recently completed her first year studying Hellenistic astrology! This is a great conversation about poetry, the cosmos, astrology, and how they can come together! Here are some highlights of what we have covered in this latest podcast episode: -Struggles with the idea of spirituality versus religion -How Su started to have an interest in astrology -The process of getting to know herself better during this pandemic -both of us sharing our journeys on how we ended up where we are now -how this past year has affected and influenced her writing and writing process ...and a lot more! Make sure to head on to your favorite podcasting app and listen to the full episode! Introducing the Witchy Writers collective! In this membership, you'll not only be part of an amazing community of women of color, but you'll also get weekly tarot-inspired writing prompts to help jump-start the creative juices or get you out of any stuckiness in your writing. AND you'll get to participate in monthly new moon sacred circles and receive guidance in monthly group coaching calls. Be a member now! Follow me on Instagram for Maverick Mondays, Free Verse Fridays, and some real talk about healing AND play: @leslieannhobayan Today's poems/ Books mentioned: “Dividing God” by Hafiz “Graveyard Shift” by Su Hwang Membership(s) Mentioned: Witchy Writers: https://suryagian.com/witchy-writers About the guest: Su Hwang is a poet, activist, stargazer, and the author of Bodega (Milkweed Editions), which received the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and was named a finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Born in Seoul, Korea, she was raised in New York then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest. She is a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and is the cofounder, with poet Sun Yung Shin, of Poetry Asylum. Su currently lives in Minneapolis.

Listen in to hear Vanessa Angélica Villareal read from her poems and talk deeply and passionately about the development of her book, Beast Meridian. We were moved by her rigorous, precise, and poetic mind and we know you will be too. If you've already read Beast Meridian, you will love hearing Villareal dive into portions of it. If you haven't yet, you're going to want to. Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellow, and has appeared in The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, The Boston Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is working on a poetry and essay collection while raising her son in Los Angeles. http://vanessaangelicavillarreal.com/ Purchase: http://vanessaangelicavillarreal.com/shop/beast-meridian

Are you ready to celebrate Janel Pineda's Lineage of Rain? With special guests: Kay Ulanday Barrett, féi hernandez, Vanessa Angélica Villareal AND Jihyun Yun?! Hosted by José Olivarez?! Y'all: get ready for the real. ---------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Janel Pineda is a Los-Angeles born Salvadoran poet and educator. She has performed her poetry internationally in both English and Spanish, and been published in LitHub, PANK, The BreakBeat Poets, Vol. 4: LatiNext, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the U.S. among others. As a Marshall Scholar, she holds an MA in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths, University of London. Janel's debut poetry chapbook, Lineage of Rain, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books. Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. Barrett's latest book More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award in Literature by the American Library Association. They have featured at The Lincoln Center, The U.N., Symphony Space, The Poetry Project, Princeton University, NYU, The Dodge Poetry Foundation, The Hemispheric Institute, and Brooklyn Museum. They've received fellowship invitations from MacDowell, Lambda Literary, Drunken Boat, VONA, The Home School, VCCA, Monson Arts, and Macondo. They are a 3x Pushcart Prize nominee and 2x Best of the Net nominee. They have written two poetry books, When The Chant Comes (Topside Press, 2016) and More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020). They currently reside in NYC/NJ and remix their mama's recipes with the company of their jowly dog. féi hernandez (b.1993 Chihuahua, México) is an Inglewood-raised immigrant trans non-binary visual artist, writer, and healer. Currently, they are the President of the Advisory Board for Gender Justice Los Angeles. They have been published in Poetry, Oxford Review of Books, Frontier, NPR's Code Switch, BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, PANK Magazine amongst others. féi is the author of Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications, 2020). Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award and the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Buzzfeed Reader, and Poetry Magazine, where her poem “f = [(root) (future)]” was honored with the 2019 Friends of Literature Prize. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid. Jihyun Yun is a Korean American poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. Winner of the 2019 Prairie Schooner Prize in poetry, her debut collection Some Area Always Hungry [an urgently beautiful collection] was published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2020. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Adroit, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere. José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Tz02p_U9-g4 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

As part of WORT's continuing celebration of Black culture and history, a special rebroadcast of a candid conversation that first aired live on February 10, 2020. Stu Levitan welcomes the award-winning Black, Queer and Poz poet and performer Danez Smith, who will be at the Central Library tonight at 7 pm, in support of their brand new collection Homie, poems about friendship and loss and violence and love, it's a presentation by our friends at the Wisconsin Book Festival. Now as long-time listeners know, it is Madison BookBeat policy to regard students at the UW as Madisonians, so Danez hits two of the three criteria. Because before Nezzy was a finalist for the National Book Award and the youngest person ever to win the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Don't Call Us Dead, before the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for [insert]boy, before the video of “Dear White America” got 387,000 views, thank you very much, before the fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, before the individual and team slam championships, before the Poetry Foundation podcast VS with Franny Choi, before they were on WORT's A Public Affair with Ali Muldrow last January, it's in the archives, check it out, before all that -- Danez Smith was in the first cohort of the ground-breaking First Wave program in the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and a member of the University of Wisconsin Class of 2012, On Wisconsin. Their third collection of poems, Homie, is now out from Graywolf press, and receiving rapturous reviews, NYT calling it a work of ‘startling originality and ambition.” which as I said is what brings them back to town for a Wisconsin Book Festival event at the Central Library, 201 West Mifflin St.  tonight at 7, it is a special reading and conversation with Sofia Snow, the director of the aforementioned Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and the First Wave Scholarship Program. It is a real pleasure to welcome Danez Smith to Madison BookBeat. Airdate on WORT 89.9 FM: Feb. 10, 2020; rebroadcast, Feb. 8, 2021

In this week’s episode, correspondent and poet Shin Yu Pai shares the fourth installment of Lyric World, featuring poet Yona Harvey in a conversation about Harvey’s newest book, You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love. Grounded deeply in the resistance of Black women, Harvey writes of ancestry, inheritance, and loss. Of Yona’s work, poet Afaa M. Weaver says, “Her voice is essential to making a cultural wholeness that would otherwise be impossible. This lyric, this unique, multimedia gift is evidence of an awakening only a few poets ever approach.” Yona Harvey is an American poet, professor, and Marvel Comics writer. Her first poetry collection, Hemming the Water, garnered Harvey the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has been published and anthologized in numerous places, including Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay. Shin Yu Pai is the author of ten books of poetry. Her work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Her essays and nonfiction writing have appeared in Tricycle, YES! Magazine, The Rumpus, City Arts, The Stranger, Medium, and others. Lyric World: Conversations with Contemporary Poets is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike. The series is supported by grants from the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture, Windrose Fund, Poets & Writers, and The Satterberg Foundation. Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here or text TOWN HALL to 44321. 

In this week’s episode, correspondent and poet Shin Yu Pai shares the fourth installment of Lyric World, featuring poet Yona Harvey in a conversation about Harvey’s newest book, You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love. Grounded deeply in the resistance of Black women, Harvey writes of ancestry, inheritance, and loss. Of Yona’s work, poet Afaa M. Weaver says, “Her voice is essential to making a cultural wholeness that would otherwise be impossible. This lyric, this unique, multimedia gift is evidence of an awakening only a few poets ever approach.” Yona Harvey is an American poet, professor, and Marvel Comics writer. Her first poetry collection, Hemming the Water, garnered Harvey the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has been published and anthologized in numerous places, including Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay. Shin Yu Pai is the author of ten books of poetry. Her work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Her essays and nonfiction writing have appeared in Tricycle, YES! Magazine, The Rumpus, City Arts, The Stranger, Medium, and others. Lyric World: Conversations with Contemporary Poets is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike. The series is supported by grants from the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture, Windrose Fund, Poets & Writers, and The Satterberg Foundation. Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here or text TOWN HALL to 44321. 

Grant Hier is the Poet Laureate of Anaheim, California. He was the 2014 recipient of Prize Americana for his book Untended Garden , which was published by The Poetry Press in 2015, and nominated for both an American Book Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. G R A N T H I E R PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH + CREATIVE WRITING LAGUNA COLLEGE OF ART + DESIGN INAUGURAL POET LAUREATE OF ANAHEIM EMERITUS www.granthier.com

This week our guest is Valencia Robin, visual artist, poet, and author of Ridiculous Light. In this episode, we discuss her writing process, andThe power of a writing groupToggling between painting and writingAnd moreIf you’re a new listener to Fierce Womxn Writing, I would love to hear from you. Please visit my Contact Page and tell me about your writing challenges.Follow this WriterVisit her WebsiteOrder her poetry collection, Ridiculous Light, the winner of Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2019 by Library Journal.Follow the PodcastVisit the Website for more info on the podcastFollow the HostSlide into Sara Gallagher’s DM’s on InstagramFollow our PartnersLearn more about The Feminist Press, which lifts up insurgent and marginalized voices from around the world to build a more just future. Become an AdvertiserUse my Contact Page or hit me up on InstaThis Week’s Writing PromptEach week the featured author offers a writing prompt for you to use at home. I suggest setting a timer for 6 or 8 minutes, putting the writing prompt at the top of your page, and free writing whatever comes to mind. Remember, the important part is keeping your pen moving. You can always edit later. Right now we just want to write something new and see what happens.This week’s writing prompt is: Write a poem where the lines go from one margin to the other.Explore Womxn AuthorsIn this episode, the author recommended these womxn writers:Linda Gregg, author of All of it SingingRita Dove, Naomi Shihab Nye, Joy Harjo, Sharon Olds, Natasha Trethewey, Brenda Shaughnessy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Natalie G. DiazEnsure the Podcast ContinuesLove what you’re hearing? Show your appreciation and become a Supporter with a monthly contribution.Check Out More ShowsEpisode 16: Writing in the Time of COVID-19 with host Sara Gallagher and poem Perhaps Prayer by Kristy MilliganSupport the show (https://fiercewomxnwriting.com/support)

Episode #37 welcomes long-time Rattle contributor Charles Harper Webb and his latest book, Sidebend World. Webb was our very first interviewee, way back in issue #4 (1995). Charles Harper Webb has published twelve books of poetry, including Brain Camp. Webb’s awards in poetry include the Morse Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, and the Benjamin Saltman Prize. Webb is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program. For more information, visit: https://upittpress.org/authors/charles-harper-webb/ This Week's Prompt: Erasure poem using a news article from the past week. Next Week's Prompt: From the point of view of the oldest living tree.

 In this episode of Poets at Work, guest host CGU student and poet Stacey Park talks with Emily Jungmin Yoon, 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, about the role that poetry can play in remembering history and grappling with the way the past lives in the present. For a transcript of this episode, email cgupodcasts at gmail.com and be sure to include the episode title. Our intro and outro music for this episode is Lee Rosevere's "Night Caves", licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/  

On February 25, 2020, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring poets John Murillo and Tina Chang. Introduction by Patricia Guzman.John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (2010), which was a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2020. His work has appeared in Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. A graduate of New York University’s MFA program in creative writing, he is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.Tina Chang is the author of the poetry collections Hybrida (2019), Of Gods & Strangers (2011), and Half-Lit Houses (2004). She is co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008). Her poems have appeared in American Poet, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and The New York Times and anthologized in Identity Lessons, Poetry Nation, Asian American Literature, and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, among others. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, and the Van Lier Foundation. Chang is the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, the first woman named to this position, and she currently teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On January 21, 2020, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring poet Terrance Hayes. Terrance Hayes is the author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins (Penguin, 2018), a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry; To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018); How to Be Drawn (2015); Lighthead (2010), which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series, and Wind in a Box. An artist-in-residence at New York University, Hayes currently resides in New York City.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (2016), which was named a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His poems have appeared in various journals, in Troubling The Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics and as part of the MOTHA exhibition, Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. Banias is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program. He lives in Berkeley, teaches poetry and works with small press books.On Feb. 7, 2019, Banias read his poetry — from Anybody and some new work — at Lunch Poems, an ongoing poetry reading series at UC Berkeley that began in 2014. All readings happen from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month in Morrison Library in Doe Library. Admission is free.Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.See all Berkeley Talks. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Oh there you are, lovely. Last week, we chopped it up with worldwide sensation Danez Smith on reading for the National Book Awards, joy, and the violence necessary to achieve utopia. For this week's episode, they brought in Franny Choi's "Introduction to Quantum Theory" for us to discuss, and spoiler alert: it's a banger. DANEZ SMITH is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Don't Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez's work has been featured widely including on Buzzfeed, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness. Danez's third collection, Homie, will be published by Graywolf in Spring 2020. FRANNY CHOI is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her second collection, Soft Science, is forthcoming from Alice James Books

On this episode of Black Market Reads, the acclaimed poet Danez Smith. Smith is the author of two award-winning collections of poetry: 2014’s [insert] boy which was awarded the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry; and their most recent collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, published by Graywolf Press in 2017, which was winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Smith is the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Smith is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of  VS, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness. To learn more about Smith's work, visit their website: http://www.danezsmithpoet.com/

You're back, dear listener, and just in time to hear us fangirl over fangirling, We also interview American treasure Danez Smith while sipping Hot Daddies.  DANEZ SMITH is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Don't Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez's work has been featured widely including on Buzzfeed, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness. Danez's third collection, Homie, will be published by Graywolf in Spring 2020.  THE HOT DADDY Fun fact! Langston Hughes's favorite cocktail was one he invented called the ‘Hard Daddy.' As described in a letter to a friend, the ‘Hard Daddy' = whiskey, maple syrup, lemon juice, and ice. For our recording sesh with Danez Smith, we decided to make a hot version of this intriguingly named cocktail, subbing hot water for the ice and serving it in a cozy mug. Go generous with the lemon and light on the syrup and your taste buds will be happy. Pairs perfectly with cold winter Mondays, Ezell's chicken, and this here episode.    INGREDIENTS: 2 oz Irish whiskey; fresh lemon; maple syrup; hot water  REFERENCES: 2018 National Book Award Poetry Finalists, The Fat Sonnets by Samantha Zighelboim, The Tradition by Jericho Brown, Youth Speaks Brave New Voices, "summer, somewhere", "Litany with Blood All Over" and "Not an Elegy" by Danez Smith; Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi; Heavy by Kiese Laymon

In this episode, Danielle shares with Max Yona Harvey’s "Report from the Daughter of a Blue Planet." Talking points include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Audre Lorde, and perfect line breaks.

Yona Harvey is the author of the poetry collection, Hemming the Water, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University and finalist for the Hurston-Wright Award. Her work has been anthologized in many publications including A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry and The Force of What’s Possible: Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda anthology and co-wrote with Ta-Nehisi Coates Marvel’s Black Panther & The Crew. She is an assistant professor in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Patrick Phillips is the author of a book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W. W. Norton 2016), and three poetry collections. His most recent, Elegy for a Broken Machine was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry; his two earlier collections are Boy and Chattahoochee. He is also the translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Phillips’ work has appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation, and his honors include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. Phillips lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University. Phillips will teach the one-credit, one-week creative writing seminar associated with the Writers’ Festival.

This episode of New Books in African American Studies covers Patrick Phillips' powerful new book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016) At the turn of the twentieth century, Forsyth County in Georgia, was home to an diverse African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. However, following the rape and murder of a white girl in 1912, and accusations levied against three black laborers, bands of white “night riders” launched a devastating campaign of arson and terror against Forsyth's black community. Expanding backwards and forwards from this flashpoint, Blood at the Root is a sweeping tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth's racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, it breaks the century-long silence of Patrick's hometown, and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century. Patrick is a past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has also received honors such as the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Drew University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

This episode of New Books in African American Studies covers Patrick Phillips’ powerful new book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016) At the turn of the twentieth century, Forsyth County in Georgia, was home to an diverse African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. However, following the rape and murder of a white girl in 1912, and accusations levied against three black laborers, bands of white “night riders” launched a devastating campaign of arson and terror against Forsyth’s black community. Expanding backwards and forwards from this flashpoint, Blood at the Root is a sweeping tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, it breaks the century-long silence of Patrick’s hometown, and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century. Patrick is a past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has also received honors such as the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Drew University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of New Books in African American Studies covers Patrick Phillips’ powerful new book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016) At the turn of the twentieth century, Forsyth County in Georgia, was home to an diverse African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. However, following the rape and murder of a white girl in 1912, and accusations levied against three black laborers, bands of white “night riders” launched a devastating campaign of arson and terror against Forsyth’s black community. Expanding backwards and forwards from this flashpoint, Blood at the Root is a sweeping tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, it breaks the century-long silence of Patrick’s hometown, and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century. Patrick is a past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has also received honors such as the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Drew University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of New Books in African American Studies covers Patrick Phillips’ powerful new book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016) At the turn of the twentieth century, Forsyth County in Georgia, was home to an diverse African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. However, following the rape and murder of a white girl in 1912, and accusations levied against three black laborers, bands of white “night riders” launched a devastating campaign of arson and terror against Forsyth’s black community. Expanding backwards and forwards from this flashpoint, Blood at the Root is a sweeping tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, it breaks the century-long silence of Patrick’s hometown, and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century. Patrick is a past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has also received honors such as the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Drew University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of New Books in African American Studies covers Patrick Phillips’ powerful new book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016) At the turn of the twentieth century, Forsyth County in Georgia, was home to an diverse African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. However, following the rape and murder of a white girl in 1912, and accusations levied against three black laborers, bands of white “night riders” launched a devastating campaign of arson and terror against Forsyth’s black community. Expanding backwards and forwards from this flashpoint, Blood at the Root is a sweeping tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, it breaks the century-long silence of Patrick’s hometown, and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century. Patrick is a past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has also received honors such as the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Drew University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today's microcast, we get a scene report from the SAFTA/Pen to Podium reading series with poet Rebecca Morgan Frank. She is the author of two collections of poems, The Spokes of Venus (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2016), and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon 2012), shortlisted for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Please join Melissa Studdard and Tiferet Journal on 7/29/13, from 7-7:30 PM EST, 6-6:30 PM CST, for a conversation with award-winning poet, memoirist, playwright, and professor, Doug Anderson.  Anderson is the author of the poetry collections, The Moon Reflected Fire and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police, as well as the play, Short Timers, and the memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery. His awards include a Pushcart Prize and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, in addition to grants and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Poets & Writers, National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Anderson currently teaches for Smith College, Emerson College, and the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Ploughshares,the Connecticut Review, The Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly, The Southern Review, Field,The Autumn House Anthology of American Poetry, and Contemporary American War Poetry. Of Anderson’s work, Martin Espada states, “He is one of the bravest poets I know, utterly uncompromising. His language brims with compassion, rage, tenderness and pain … Anderson is cursed and blessed with memory, and his considerable poetic gift assures that we won’t forget, either.” Tiferet Journal has recently published a compilation of twelve of our best transcribed interviews. To purchase The Tiferet Talk Interviews book, please click here.

All-American Poem (American Poetry Review)Kate Tufts Discovery Award-winner Matthew Dickman writes emotional and accessible poetry...

Terrance Hayes is the author of three books of poetry: Muscular Music, Hip Logic, and Wind in A Box. He has received a Whiting Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship; he has also been selected for the Best American Poetry anthology. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.Hayes read from his work on October 30, 2008, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.