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“The conundrum of a writer’s life, particularly that of a poet’s, is learning to embody a paradox,” says Rita Dove, winner of the 2018 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, in this recording of the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival. “One has to be fierce and tender at the same time. Loud and quiet. Brash and introspective.”
Submissions are currently open through for the New Ohio Review Literary Prizes. Given annually by New Ohio Review, the three awards honor a poem or group of poems, a short story, and an essay. Kim Addonizio will judge in poetry, Madeline ffitch will judge in fiction, and Melissa Febos will judge in nonfiction. The winning writers will each receive $1,500 and publication in the journal.
Submit a poem or group of poems of up to six pages or a story or essay of up to 20 pages with a $22 entry fee, which includes a subscription to New Ohio Review, by April 15. All entries are considered for publication. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
New Ohio Review is published twice yearly by the creative writing program of Ohio University and is based in Athens, Ohio. Previous contest winners include poet Emily Lee Luan, fiction writer Nicole VanderLinden, and nonfiction writer Tania De Rozario.
“Even when I was starving, I was eating. Inhaling words like a kid with a lunch card, like this is a meal I might miss,” reads Natasha Carrizosa from her poem “ABC ME” at Station Museum in Houston, Texas for Write About Now Poetry.
The 12th annual Tutka Bay Writers Retreat, sponsored by 49 Writers, was held from September 23 to September 25 at Tutka Bay Lodge near Homer, Alaska. The retreat offered an intimate workshop, capped at 15 participants, open to poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and translators, as well as outdoor activities such as sea kayaking, whale watching, and hiking. Poet, fiction writer, and nonfiction writer Luis Alberto Urrea led the retreat. Tuition, which included housing and meals, was $925 for 49 Writers nonmembers and $855 for 49 Writers members.
Tutka Bay Writers Retreat, 49 Writers, Inc., P.O. Box 140014, Anchorage, AK 99514. Ben Kuntz, Coordinator.
In this video, Shane McCrae reads his poem “Jim Limber on the Gardens of the Face of God” from his collection Sometimes I Never Suffered (Corsair, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize.
“Last to the podium was Muriel Rukeyser, / who once wrote her own Smartian vow: ‘Never / to despise in myself what I have been / taught to despise, and never to despise the other.’” The late Galway Kinnell reads from his poem “Jubilate” and discusses the work and impact of poet Muriel Rukeyser with Sharon Olds in this Paris Press video celebrating Rukeyser’s book of essays, The Life of Poetry.
“I had a dream of having poetry at the intersections of New York, where all kinds of people pass through daily,” says Marie Howe, former New York State poet laureate, in this 2015 video about the inspiration for the Poetry in Motion: The Poet Is In festival. The annual National Poetry Month event is hosted by the Poetry Society of America and MTA Arts & Design, and features poems written on request by award-winning poets.
“[Nashville] is hot chicken on sopping white bread with green pickle / chips—sour to balance prismatic, flame-colored spice / for white people,” writes Tiana Clark in her poem “Nashville,” published in the New Yorker in 2017. The poem interlaces personal experience and anecdotes with a historical overview of the Southern city’s development. “I-40 bisected the black community / like a tourniquet of concrete. There were no highway exits. / 120 businesses closed,” writes Clark. Write a poem about a city you’ve lived in. How does your time there intersect with the history of the town? Use research to find significant events that take your poem to a deeper place beyond your own life.
“I hope everyone who writes begins by recognizing their own value and the value of the very act of their having chosen to write.” —Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier), author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina
The 2021 guest editor of Ōrongohau: Best New Zealand Poems 2021 discusses the editorial process behind the anthology and what it reveals about contemporary New Zealand poetry.
