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“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.
“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
“[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.
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.
This 2022 AWP Conference & Book Fair event held at Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture in Philadelphia and copresented by Radius of Arab American Writers celebrates the Experimental Issue of Mizna featuring readings by poets George Abraham, Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman, Tracy Fuad, Yasmine Rukia, Glenn Shaheen, and Issam Zineh.
From the Czech word litost—a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery—to the German word schadenfreude—the pleasure derived from the misfortune of others—to the French word dépaysement—the restlessness that comes with being away from your country of origin—untranslatable words have continued to be a source of inspiration for writers across languages. Each word reflects the culture from which it comes as well as illustrates the inability for language to fully capture the human experience. Write a poem using an untranslatable word as a jumping-off point. For inspiration, read Barbara Hamby’s poem “Toska” included in her book On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014).
