Announcements
Hear some of Purvi's poetry, its inspirations, Rajiv's questions, and foot-tapping Bollywood music too! At 4 p.m. EST today and tomorrow on the JUS Radio website at http://tunein.com/radio/JUS-Radio-s177833/ (or download the JUS Radio app on your Iphone or Android if you are on the go!).
Congrats, dear April!
"This reading by students, alumni, and staff of the Jimenez-Porter Writers’ House is the culmination of an evening of good eats, speeches, games, and door prizes to celebrate the House’s ten-year anniversary.
As a former assistant director and instructor (2004-‘07), I arrived too late for the crab rangoon and sushi, but I enjoyed a slab of red velvet cake, catching up with old students, meeting new ones, sharing my poetry, and most of all, cheering on the program’s remarkable ten-year run. The House has flourished through the toughest of economic times—a testament to the University’s commitment to educating young writers."
Read the rest of her blog post here.
April Naoko Heck was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1971, and moved to the United States seven years later. Her poems have most recently appeared in Artful Dodge, Borderland: Texas Quarterly Review, Epiphany, and Shenandoah. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award and held a writers residency at VCCA. Her first book of poems, A Nuclear Family, is forthcoming from UpSet Press in Fall 2013.
From louderARTS' Facebook Page:
We are thrilled to be closing out our 2012 season with this brilliant and generous poets. Please join us for our final double feature of 2012: Patrick Rosal and Angel Nafis!
Showtime is 7:30pm. But come early for our free weekly rooftop workshop at 6pm. As always there will be two-for-one drinks all night. Cover is $6/$5 with student ID.
And this is your last chance to get in free with a donation to hurricane relief efforts. If you donate $10 or more online and print out your receipt, we will waive your cover charge. Or come make a donation at one of our computers and we will refund what you paid at the door.
Patrick Rosal is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Boneshepherds (2011), My American Kundiman (2006), and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003). His collections have been honored with the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, Global Filipino Literary Award and the Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award. In 2009, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines. He is currently on the faculty of Rutgers University-Camden's MFA program.
Angel Nafis is an Ann Arbor, Michigan native and Cave Canem Fellow. Her work can be stumbled upon in FOUND Magazine’s Requiem for a Paper Bag, Decibels, GirlSpeak Webzine, The Bear Rivers Writing Conference Online Magazine, MUZZLE Magazine, and The Rattling Wall. In 2011 she represented the LouderArts poetry project at both the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam. Author of the chapbook BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press, 2012), she is an Urban Word NYC Mentor and currently curates and hosts a poetry reading series in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Congrats to Monica Ong for her nomination in Tidal Basin Review for her poem "Bo Suerte."
Monica Ong, artist and poet in new media, creates narrative installations that investigate social hierarchies and cultural silences in the context of public health. Monica completed her MFA in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. Her research has included fellowships at the Oral History Summer Institute at Columbia University, and the Writing the Medical Experience Workshop at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also a Kundiman Fellow in poetry whose work has been published most recently in the Lantern Review, as well as forthcoming issues of Drunken Boat, and The New Sound: A Journal Interdisciplinary Art & Literature.
Congrats to Matthew Olzmann for his nomination from B O D Y for his poem "A RIVER, BRIEFLY PARALLEL TO AN EIGHT-LANE SUPER HIGHWAY" and for his nomination from the New England Review for his poem "The Tiny Men in the Horse's Mouth."
Matthew Olzmann's first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the Kundiman Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Alice James Books.
Congrats to Ocean Vuong for his Pushcart nomination from the South Dakota Review for his poem "Time Maker."
Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong was raised by women (a single mother, aunts, and a grandmother) in housing projects throughout Hartford, Connecticut. He received his B.A. in English Literature at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His first chapbook Burnings was released by Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010. A Kundiman fellow, other honors include a 2012 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for Younger Poets, an Academy of American Poets prize, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in the American Poetry Review, Guernica, and Drunken Boat, amongst others.
Congrats to Tarfia Faizullah for her Pushcart nominations from Blackbird and from Passages North for her poem "Register of Eliminated Villages."
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry's First Book Award. Her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, LA Review of Books, Mid-American Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, an AWP Intro Journals Award, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, and other honors, as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop.
Congrats, dear Ocean!
VB: We published your poem “Pedicures” in RHINO 2012, so I’d like to begin with a couple of questions about it. We love the sensuous and sensory language in this poem, and the deeply respectful—even reverent—portrait of the speaker’s aunt as she gives yet another pedicure to a perfect stranger: “Her fingers slide along each lathered / and tortured vein. […] She scrubs and scrubs. / She shines—until the foot gleams / immaculate”.
Can you speak a bit about what or who inspired you to write this poem? And about your favorite language used to describe her in the poem?
OV: The speaker’s aunt is my own. But she is also my mother, grandmother, uncle, cousin, and father. For many Vietnamese living in America, the nail salon is often the vital backbone behind each family. Thousands of lawyers, doctors, musicians, scholars, and writers can trace their achievements directly back to the humble little nail salon. However, the salon is also a lifeline for Vietnam as well: many salon workers send money back to the motherland, often supporting multiple families on a salary of as little as $12,000.00 a year.
For the full interview, click here
Pre-order Mezzanines at Powells or at Amazon!
"Olzmann’s skilled play, terrific ear, and immense heart make Mezzanines a must-read."
—Pat Rosal
There is no place Matthew Olzmann doesn’t visit in his poignant debut. From underwater to outer space, Mezzanines is a contained universe, constantly shifting through multiple perceptions of the surreal and the real. A lyrical conversation with mortality, Olzmann explores identity, faith, and our sense of place, with an acute awareness of our minute existence.
From "NASA Video Transmission Picked Up By Baby Monitor":
How many shadows are there left to name?
Logophobia is the fear of words. Keraunothnetophobia
is the fear of falling man-made satellites.
Imagine this last one:
you walk outside and look to heaven
expecting a sky lab plunging down on you—wires
everywhere, bolts loosening, metal body in flames.
Instead, you see only blue, endless blue,
the color of a baby’s new blanket, cloaking everything.
Matthew Olzmann is a graduate of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Inch, Gulf Coast, Rattle, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. Currently, he is a writer-in-residence for the InsideOut Literary Arts Project and the poetry editor of The Collagist.
Publication Date: May 14, 2013
Pre-order at Powells or Amazon
"We Come Elemental introduces us to a poet of uncommon elegance and mystery. These poems act as a tour guide for the human heart, with sparse and fragrant writing. Haunting and full of humanity, these poems lash us to the world underwater and through the body politic with a sizzling ear and eye for what makes the body thrum."—Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Tamiko Beyer spent the first ten years of her life in Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of the chapbook bough breaks (Meritage Press). She received her M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and was awarded a Chancellor’s Fellowship. Beyer is a former Kundiman Fellow, a recipient of a grant from the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and a contributing editor to Drunken Boat. She works as the Advocacy Writer at Corporate Accountability International.
Iris A. Law is the editor of Lantern Review, a graduate of the M.F.A. program at the University of Notre Dame, and a Kundiman Fellow. Her first chapbook, Periodicity, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in February 2013, and is available for preorder on the publisher’s web site through December 22nd.
The 10th biennial Phenomenal Woman Reception and Awards Fundraiser celebrated women who have made local and worldwide contributions to women’s equality Saturday.
The event, held in the USU Grand Salon, awarded six women including Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams, human rights activists Melissa Roxas and Chancee Martorell, Lindsey Horvath, West Hollywood City Council Member, and performance artist María Elena Gaitán.
“These women have done a lot, so it’s really exciting to be here and see that the GWS department does such a big event,” said Vike, 24.
Another speaker, Roxas, spoke of her health care work in the Philippines in 2009, a trip during which she was abducted at gunpoint and tortured for six days by the Philippine military. She is one survivor of three women; the two others are still missing.
“Every time it feels nervous to speak in front of a crowd or share my story, I think about not only these two women, but many other women who cannot be here to speak about what they’ve been through,” said Roxas, who was holding back tears. “My voice may be quivering, but my spirit is strong.”
Read the complete story here: http://sundial.csun.edu/2012/11/phenomenal-women-honored-for-human-rights-and-womens-activism/
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