Congrats to Scott Woods, President of Poetry Slam, Inc., for completing another 24-hour poetry feature in celebration of National Poetry Month. It’s a pretty amazing feat to pull off once, but this is the fourth year in a row Scott has pulled off this marathon reading and without repeating a poem from any of his previous 24-hour sets.
For a full set list and some thoughts on making it through a complete day of reading poems, you can check out Scott’s LiveJournal entries here and here.
If you’re looking for a writing prompt to help ya with the poem-a-day challenge, you might want to check out this blog for some persona poem prompts:
Come In Character
A place for characters of all shapes, sizes, backgrounds and gender (or genders, as the case may be). Welcome!
via Nathan Bransord’s blog
Anybody else have a helpful site?
Rich Villar is among the Garden State poets who shared their poetic take on immigration at the My New Life, My New Poem Festival.
Line by Line, Poets Capture the Immigrant Story, New Jersey Style
A cynic once said writing poetry is like ice fishing — you have to really want to do it to do it. But here we were Friday night in Woodbridge on the first day of the My New Life, My New Poem Festival of Contemporary Immigration Writing, reminded of how many people from such diverse backgrounds seem to want to do it.
Most, but not all, of the readers had New Jersey ties. Some were children of immigrants. Still, as a snapshot of our assorted diasporas, here it was : Emanuel di Pasquale from Ragusa, Sicily; Sheema Kalbasi from Tehran; Paul Sohar, a Hungarian native who for years combined being a chemist at Merck with writing poetry; Rich Villar of Paterson, part Puerto Rican and part Cuban; Heather Raffo with excerpts from her one-woman play about Iraqi women, “Nine Parts of Desire.â€
Complete article is at the New York Times.
• Guest Editors Daniel Alarcón and Diego Trelles Paz bring together ten emerging authors for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story’s Latin America Issue. Cover and illustrations by Guillermo del Toro.
• Congrats to John Olivares Espinoza, Gary Soto and all the writers nominated for this year’s Northern California Book Awards.
• Take a listen to Annecy Báez read from her Mármol Prize winning collection for the Lehman College podcast.
• ♪Súbete a mi moto♫ Ex-Menudo Xavier visits the Barnes & Noble in the Bronx to promote his new finance book.
I love the cover image on Kevin A. González’s first book. Add that to the great work I’ve heard on Fishouse, Kevin’s Momotombo press chapbook, and this review from Rigoberto, and ya know I’m looking to read this book real soon.
Rigoberto González: Immigrant’s hope, disillusionment both have a place in ‘Cultural Studies‘
“Let’s all believe in the place/these hard plastic seats are taking us,” says the speaker of the opening poem “Flat American Waltz.” He sits on a bus, disillusioned by the American dream, but hopeful that the next stop will offer a different story.
This rare combination of expectation and melancholy is what sets Kevin A. González’s debut, “Cultural Studies” (Carnegie Mellon University Press, $15.95 paperback), apart. González writes about the experience of working hard, only to watch the fruits of that labor collapse or be received with indifference.
Complete review is at the El Paso Times.
