August 27: Tamiko Beyer, Matthew Olzmann, & Jamaal May read at Word for Word in Bryant Park

Word for Word Poetry welcomes Alice James Books
Bryant Park Reading Room
(mid-block on the 42nd Street side of Bryant Park)

Tuesday, August 27, 2013
7:00pm – 8:30pm

More here: http://tamikobeyer.com/readings-and-events/ 

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Tamiko Beyer spent the first ten years of her life in Tokyo, Japan, and has since lived in cities near the water on the West and East coast. She is the author of We Come Elemental (Alice James Books) and bough breaks (Meritage Press). She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she was awarded a Chancellor's Fellowship. Beyer has received grants and fellowships from Kundiman, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and VONA/Voices. She is the Senior Writer at Corporate Accountability International in Boston.

Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and educator from Detroit, MI where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. He is the author of Hum (Alice James Books, Nov 2013), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, and two poetry chapbooks (The God Engine and The Whetting of Teeth). His poems have been published widely in journals such as POETRY,Ploughshares, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and New England Review.   

 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. 

Yes to Eugenia Leigh & Ocean Vuong for making the list of 23 More People Who Made Me Care about Poetry in 2013--now up at HTMLGiant.

Congrats, dear Eugenia and Ocean! 

Check here to view the list, now up at htmlgiant. 

Eugenia Leigh is the author of a full-length collection of poetry, Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), which was a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including PANK Magazine, North American Review, The Collagist, and the Best New Poets 2010 anthology.

 

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 and received his B.A. in English Literature from Brooklyn College.

He is the author of two chapbooks: No (YesYes Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was an American Library Association’s “Over The Rainbow” selection and has been taught widely in universities, both in America and abroad. A recipient of a 2014 Pushcart Prize, other honors include fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation For the Arts, as well as an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award. Poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, Passages North, Guernica, The Normal School, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize. Work has also been translated into Hindi, Korean, Vietnamese, and Russian.

Sejal Shah is this week's Kenyon Review Online feature for her essay "Street Scene"!

Congrats, dear Sejal!

 

Street Scene

by Sejal Shah

Parisians call this neighborhood mixed. Mixed is code; it means immigrants. Think Brooklyn, Caitlin says. We are in the 20th Arrondissement, near Père Lachaise. I am here to see the Louvre and the Turkish Baths; I am here to visit my friend, Caitlin. I have a map and some time for wandering. To travel by yourself and enjoy it is a skill; I don't practice enough.

The 20th Arrondissement. Storefronts with fuchsia and blue signs; Senegalese behind tables of patterned scarves, watch caps, and leather bags; music, a low flare around which we warm ourselves at the park, at pool tables, at long wooden bars. LeeAnne isn't here to tell me where she stayed in Paris. When I think of her, I see us talking in my backyard, splashing in the pool, upstate New York summers. It surprises me. She was never there, but I can see it: the blue pool, our hideaway; beach towels; instant iced tea. I imagine we lay ourselves out on the uneven flagstones, waiting to be hot enough to peel ourselves off and fling ourselves into the water. If I close my eyes hard enough, if I squint, I can almost see it, this scene-that we grew up together. She was that kind of friend. As I walk through Paris, I keep expecting to catch a glimpse of her, vanishing into some narrow street.

. . . 

Click here to continue reading this essay.

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 Sejal Shah is a writer and teacher of writing. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals and books including the Asian American Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, the Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America (Seal Press). 

 

Jennifer S. Cheng's from "Letters to Mao" published at Web Conjunctions

Congrats, dear Jennifer! 

"Letters to Mao"  are the this week's Web Conjunctions Exclusive! To read the poems, click here: http://www.conjunctions.com/webconj.htm 

Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of a chapbook, Invocation: An Essay (New Michigan Press). Her writing appears in the Seneca Review, The Collagist, Quarterly West, and Fifty-Fifty, an anthology of Hong Kong writing. She lives in San Francisco.  

Tamiko Beyer's "We Come Elemental" reviewed at Lamba Literary

Congrats, dear Tamiko! 

We Come Elemental
By Tamiko Beyer

"Tamiko Beyer packs a good deal of complication into We Come Elemental, her slim new book of poetry from Alice James Books. With a lean, lyrical style, Beyer asks the reader to contemplate the connection between the natural world and ourselves; how water and mud and land intersect with identity and body and politics; and whether the lines we draw are as firm as we would have ourselves believe."

To read the more, click here: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/?s=tamiko+beyer&submit

Bushra Rehman interview now up at The Village Voice

Congrats to our dear Bushra! 

Read the article here: bit.ly/15hr8PS 

Bushra Rehman's first novel, Corona, is a fragmented, poetic, on-the-road adventure told from the perspective of the charismatic Razia Mirza. After coming of age in a tight Muslim community surrounding the first Sunni Masjid built in New York City, a rebellious streak leads to Razia's excommunication, prompting the young heroine to flee. Stories that alternate between childhood memories and the misadventures of her young adulthood slowly reveal glimpses of the past that Razia is escaping and the Queens neighborhood that has shaped her life.

Rehman's poems, stories, and essays have been featured on  BBC  radio and in the New York Times, among other publications, and she co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. Here, via e-mail, she talks about the Muslim community in her native borough, being a new mother, and why her protagonist aspires to be shameless.

Congrats to Jane Wong, distinguished Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship Finalist

Congrats, dear Jane! 

Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships

Five Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships in the amount of $15,000 will be awarded to young poets through a national competition sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry. Established in 1989 by the Indianapolis philanthropist Ruth Lilly, the fellowships are intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry.

The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine announce the 35 finalists for the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships. 

2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship Finalists

Ruth Awad
Kai Carlson-Wee
Mario Chard
Chris Childers
Jen Coleman
Caleb Curtiss
Michael Dauro
Caitlin Doyle
Kyle Flak
Patrick Ryan Frank
Harmony Holiday
Hieu Huynh
Marcus Jackson
Jennifer Luebbers
Jamaal May
Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren
Matt Morton
Matthew Nienow
Anne Noftle-Kelli
Hannah Sanghee Park
Meghan Privitello
Megan Pugh
Erika L. Sanchez
Danniel Schoonebeek
Natalie Shapero
Solmaz Sharif
Mairead Small Staid
Rich Smith
Ida Stewart
Sarah Trudgeon
Lindsay Turner
Sharon Wang
Eric Weinstein
Phillip B. Williams
Jane Wong

* * *

About the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship Program
Established in 1989 by Ruth Lilly to encourage the further writing and study of poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship program has dramatically expanded since its inception. Until 1995, university writing programs nationwide each nominated one student poet for a single fellowship; from 1996 until 2007, two fellowships were awarded. In 2008 the competition was opened to all U.S. poets between 21 and 31 years of age, and the number of fellowships increased to five, totaling $75,000.