Get your Poetry Fix in Montpelior This Friday!

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Vermont College of Fine Arts will be hosting a reading on Friday, April 22, 4-6 p.m.

 

Readings by Vermont poets Dave Cavanagh, Kerrin McCadden, Baron Wormser and Montpelier High Schools poets Maggie Kinzel and Sandra Markowitz will be included.  The reading is from 4:00-5:00, in the College Hall Chapel, and it will be followed by a reception/meet-the-author session in the Wood Art Gallery with food and beverages; the VCFA bookstore will also be open during this time and author books available. 

 

David Cavanagh’s books of poetry include The Middleman (2003) and Falling Body (2009), both published by Salmon Poetry of Ireland.  His poems have also appeared in chapbooks, anthologies, and journals in Canada, Ireland, the U.K., and the U.S.  He lives in Burlington and works for Johnson State College as an associate dean with the External Degree Program.

 

Maggie Kinzel is an artist, musician, writer, performer, and Boston-bound high school senior. Published poet in "Young Writers Anthology 2", "American Library of Poetry--The Gold Edition", and member of Hungry Rat Revue. She runs her own business for portrait photography and lives in a caffeine buzzed world of bright colors and biggest city dreams. She likes to focus on extensive imagery of the untouched, and she currently obsesses over vertebrae and the layers to the sky.

 

Sandra Markowitz has been writing poems since she was eight, and is now a senior at Montpelier High School. She went to The New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf, and also enjoys drawing, reading, and cooking dumplings. 

 

Kerrin McCadden’s poems have recently appeared or will soon in American Poetry Review, Failbetter, Hunger Mountain, RATTLE, Poet Lore, Pank and elsewhere.  She was a finalist for the 2010 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for the "Discovery"/Boston Review 2010 Poetry Contest, the 2010 Ralph Nading Hill Award and the 2009 RATTLE Poetry Prize. She teaches creative writing and literature at Montpelier High School and is on the poetry faculty at The New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf. She lives in Plainfield, Vermont.

 

Baron Wormser is the author of eleven books including The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid and co-author of two books about teaching poetry. His most recent volume of poetry, Impenitent Notes, was published in March 2011. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of Maine.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Coming to JSC!

THURSDAY, APRIL 21: 

                        NATASHA TRETHEWEY

                                                (5:30pm, Stearns Space)

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Poet Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She is the author of three collections of poetry:  Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), and Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of a book of creative non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Georgia, 2010).


Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize (selected by Rita Dove), a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia, received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in several volumes of Best American Poetry, and in journals such as Agni, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among others. She received a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.


Trethewey is also the recipient of the 2008 Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts and was named the 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year. In 2009 she was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and she was the James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. During the 2005-2006 academic year she was Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.


Her fourth collection of poetry, Thrall, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Fall 2012. This year she will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

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Watch a video of Natasha Trethewey's reading at Emory University on May 8, 2007 in honor of her Pulitzer Prize.


See photos from the May 8 dinner and reading:
http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/tretheweyeventphotos.html
http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/tretheweyeventphotos2.html
http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/tretheweyeventphotos3.html

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Interviews on NPR's Fresh Air with Terri Gross:  


July 16, 2007: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12003278


January 20, 2009: Natasha Trethewey was featured in a special Inauguration Day edition of National Public Radio's "Fresh Air." Trethewey, who attended the inauguration, talks with host Terri Gross about the significance of the day for the country's -- and her own -- racial history, and reads "My Mother Dreams Another Country" from her Pulitzer-Prize winning collection, Native Guard, and recites Langston Hughes' powerful verse, "I, Too, Sing America. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99474984

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Watch two videos of Natasha Trethewey reading her poetry:
"Theories of Time and Space"
"Elegy for the Native Guards"

PoJazz Returns to JSC This Tuesday!

Johnson State College's PoJazz poetry/jazz fusion project puts on its last performance of the season in the Stearns Performance Space this Tuesday, April 12 at 9:00 pm.

We encourage poets and prose writers to bring their own work and read with us.

PoJazzers believe that jazz, especially the blues, tells stories and that poetry, at its lyrical best, is never far from music and dance. In each performance, poets read from their own written work while musicians interweave riffs that erupt from both the rhythms of a poetic line and the musical phrase. 

If you'd like more info about our group, check us out on line at:

Johnson State College: Writing and Literature/PoJazz

Kaitlyn Greenidge on Autobiographical Fiction and New Novel

In the new issue of Talking Writing, fiction writer Kaitlyn Greenidge, who visited JSC in March, talks in her essay "Something Prickly and Strange" about the ways in which autobiography interact with the writing of fiction.  She discusses at great length, too, her new novel, about an African American family who move from Boston to the Berkshires to take part in an experiment whereby they raise a chimpanzee with their own children.  Kaitlyn read an excerpt from this novel when she visited JSC, an altered version of which will appear in the spring issue of Green Mountains Review.

Here is an excerpt from Kaitlyn's essay:

When I first began writing, it was for a reason I think a lot of younger people start writing: revenge. Wanting to set the record straight.

Although I’ve never written a story based strictly on a memory, my earliest pieces were inspired by times in my life when I felt that an emotional justice had not been served or an emotional truth had been ignored. I wrote to feel justified as a person—as someone with valid feelings and opinions, someone whose observations and understanding of the world were real and credible.

In the long run, revenge can be a severely limiting motivation. I remember trying to start a novel in high school and worrying that I would soon run out of autobiographical material. I couldn’t conceive of writing a main character or narrator who didn’t have my same thoughts and feelings and family background.

As I became more practiced at writing—and especially as I read more—I found that when I read fiction I perceived as coming from that desire for reckoning, it left me dissatisfied. The work might be spirited and energetic, but I ended up feeling emotionally exhausted and embarrassed—for myself and for the writer.

Read the rest of "Something Prickly and Strange" here . . .

Also, read the companion essay written by Kaitlyn's sister, acclaimed playwright Kirsten Greenidge, "Something Wonderfully Dionysian."

Flash Fiction Contests!

If you've taken any creative writing workshops at JSC, chances are that you have lying around somewhere a notebook or two full of writing exercises.  Some of these exercises may have turned into full-length stories or poems, while others sit waiting to be rediscovered.

One very satisfying way to put these exercises to use is to try to turn them into short short fiction (or "flash fiction") -- stories ranging from 100 to 1,000 words.  The fun thing about writing short shorts is to discover how narrative redefines itself under compression, or dissolves altogether, allowing the writer to explore more associative or lyric modes that at times approach poetry.  Part of the power of such pieces lies in their strangeness and suggestive power.

So try to put together two or three short shorts to submit to one of the following flash fiction contests, which are posted at NewPages.com.  Next to each link is the submission fee and deadline:


Our Stories. Flash Fiction. $10. 1/16 - 4/15 (annual)


American Short Fiction. Short Shorts. $15. 2/15 - 5/1 (annual)


Glimmer Train. Very Short Fiction. $15. 5/1 - 5/31 (annual)


WOW! Women On Writing. Flash Fiction. $10. 5/31 (annual)


Indiana Review. Prose Poem, Short Short. $15. 6/15 


Literal Latte. Short Short. $10. 6/30 (annual)


Glimmer Train. Very Short Fiction. $15. 7/1 - 7/31 (annual)


Gemini Magazine. Flash Fiction. $4. 8/31/10


Gulf Coast. Prose Poetry, Short Story, Micro-Essay. $15 (postal), $18 (online). 8/31 (annual)


NANO Fiction. Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction, Micro Essay. $15. 8/31/10

WOW! Women On Writing. Flash Fiction. $10. 8/31 (annual)

Southeast Missouri State University Press. Short Story, Flash Fiction. $15. 10/1 (annual)

CutBank. Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction. $9. 10/1 - 11/1/11

River Styx. Micro-fiction. $20. 12/31 (annual)

In addition to these contests, there are a number of print and online literary journals that feature or even specialize in short short prose pieces -- all of which you can learn about and find links to on NewPages.com:

Bateau / Black Warrior Review / Brevity (nonfiction) / BULL:  Men's Fiction / Burnside Review / Caketrain / Curly Red Stories / CutBank / failbetter.com / Fiction Fix / Glossolalia / Green Silk Journal / Harpur Palate / Hobart / matchbook.com / Mud Luscious Press / NANO Fiction / New York Tyrant / New Ohio Review / New Orleans Review / New South / Ninth Letter / Noon / PANK / Passages North / Phoebe / Quarterly West / Quick Fiction / Sentence (prose poetry) / Sleepingfish / SmokeLong Quarterly / Southeast Review / South Loop (nonfiction) / storySouth.com / subTropics / Unsaid