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In a greyscale photo, a woman stands in front of a window.

Hearing Voices: Women Versing Life presents Wendy Mnookin & Daughters Writing Grief

I first heard Wendy Mnookin read her work during AWP, and later I discovered our odd, unfortunate commonality: Both of our fathers were killed in car accidents. The circumstances differ greatly, but the impulse to write about death, to look at it from every direction, is the same, so this week I asked Mnookin to…

A crowd of people stand in black and white protesting.

Gatekeepers Part Four-point-Two: in defense of “telling” and sentimental preachiness

Two winters ago, brand-new to the creative writing community of Madison, Wisconsin, I was at ground zero of the national debate on union rights, caught in a throng of 70,000 protestors marching around the State Capitol, screaming “Whose Streets? Our Streets!,” “This Is What Democracy Looks Like!,” and “It’s Not About The Money, It’s About…

cover of Dark Room by Jazzy Danzinger

Dear Dr. Poetry

Darkroom Jazzy Danziger University of Wisconsin Press, March 2012 72 pages $16.95  Dear Dr. Poetry, I’m a mime currently looking to transition into set design, but I keep losing jobs because my sketches are just blank pages. I have no idea how to translate emotion into visual effects or create a scene that supports a…

image of Downtown Omaha city skyline in a bright, sunlit park with a lake

Literary Boroughs #3: Omaha, NE

The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. The series will run on our blog from May 2012 until AWP13 in Boston. Please enjoy the third post on Omaha, Nebraska by Katie…

Cartoon illustration of a group of silhoutted children laughing

People Are Funny

This is old news, but in 2005, the Poetry Foundation gave the poet Billy Collins something called the Mark Twain Poetry Award of $25,000, “recognizing a poet’s contribution to humor in American poetry.”   The press release included these two sentences:  “Billy Collins has brought laughter back to a melancholy art.  He shows us that good…

map of the American Northwest with a caption that reads "Portsmouth, NH"

Literary Boroughs #2: Portsmouth, NH

The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. The series will run on our blog from May 2012 until AWP13 in Boston. Please enjoy the second post on Portsmouth, New Hampshire by…

cartoon illustration of a "pen knife"

Gatekeepers Part Four-point-One: on why the [red] pen is mightier than the sword (and other politically useful clichés)

Nearly ten years ago, when I was a twenty-year-old baby-poet with a sense of self-importance even more inflated than it is today, I organized a “Poetry in Protest” reading in Amherst, Massachusetts to demonstrate against what became, a couple months later, “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” My work screening manuscripts for this event forever changed the way…