Announcing the Next Lineup for the First Person Plural Reading Series (Virtual) on Sunday, September 12, 2021!

Join us via Zoom on Sunday, September 12, 2021 from 6-8pm for the next reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Allen Gee, Robert Jones, Jr., Kevin McIlvoy, Peter Markus and Vanessa K. Valdés, hosted and curated by Stacy Parker Le Melle. Each writer is extraordinary and I am thrilled that they will join us for this reading. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. RSVP here.

More about the writers:

Gee3Allen Gee is the author of the essay collection, My Chinese America.  He recently completed a novel, The Laborers, and is currently at work on At Little Monticello: the James Alan McPherson biography, (UGA Press).  He’s been the Editor at Gulf Coast, Fiction Editor at Arts & Letters, and Editor of the multicultural imprint 2040 Books.  His essay Old School won a Pushcart, and his work appears in numerous journals, as well as the anthology, Dear America.  He is currently the D.L. Jordan Distinguished Chair of Creative Writing at Columbus State University where he also serves as the Director/Editor of CSU Press.

Robert Jones Jr._credit Alberto Vargas RainRiver Images _croppedNew York Times-bestselling author Robert Jones, Jr., was born and raised in New York City. He received his BFA in creative writing with honors and MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College. He has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Paris Review, Essence, OkayAfrica, The Feminist Wire, and The Grio. He is the creator of the social-justice social media community Son of Baldwin. The Prophets is his debut novel. Photo Credit: Alberto Vargas RainRiver Images.

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Peter Markus is the author of several books of fiction, among them the novel Bob, or Man on Boat, and the collections of shorter fiction The Fish and the Not Fish, We Make Mud, and Good, Brother. He is also the author of Inside My Pencil, a work of non-fiction about the work he’s been doing for over two decades as a writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit. A new book of poems, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, is forthcoming in September of 2021. 

Head Shot McIlvoy - (Hi-Res)-4Kevin McIlvoy’s novel One Kind Favor (WTAW Press, May 2021) is his eighth published book. He has published five novels, A Waltz (Lynx House Press), The Fifth Station (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; paperback, Collier/Macmillan), Little Peg (Atheneum/Macmillan; paperback, Harper Perennial), Hyssop (TriQuarterly Books; paperback, Avon), At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press); and a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf Press). His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. His short-short stories and prose poems have appeared in The Scoundrel, The Collagist, Pif, Kenyon Review Online, The Cortland Review, Prime Number, r.k.v.r.y, Waxwing, and various online literary magazines. A collection of his prose poems and short-short stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C, has been published by Four Way Books (October 2017). For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor in chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1987 to 2019; he taught as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008. He has lived in Asheville, North Carolina since 2008.

Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is the director of the Black Studies Program at The City CollegeScreen Shot 2019-10-09 at 10.51.18 PM of New York-CUNY. A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, and a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, her research interests focus on the cultural production of Black peoples throughout the Americas: the United States and Latin America, including Brazil, and the Caribbean. She is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She is the author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). Her latest book, Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020) is an edited collection that re-centers Haiti in the disciplines of Caribbean, and more broadly, Latin American Studies.   

FPP Interview: Ashaki Jackson

Ashaki CandidIn her FPP Interview, Ashaki Jackson shares that despite writing on being surveilled and targeted as a Black person in the United States, and how grief for Black Americans feels either “iterative” or “unending,” her parents were still able to create a profound sense of protection for her, and what that meant. Jackson also shares what brought her peace during the pandemic quarantine, and much more.  Read her interview then RSVP to join us virtually on Sunday, April 18, 2021 from 6-8pm to hear Ashaki Jackson read with Ed Baptist, I.S. Jones, Kristin Palm, and Alison Stine.

We met the poems of Surveillance in 2016, and just as police officers have not stopped killing Black people with enduring impunity, your poems have remained as relevant to the moment as anything on tonight’s evening news. How have you been coping with this – our – reality? Do you feel anything has changed since when you first wrote these poems?

I cannot tell if grief is iterative or unending, you know? How does one cope with war? And when I say “war,” I mean that an armed group has been fighting against our existence in this nation for generations. It feels old, and so do I. It ages you. Despite knowing that killing Black Americans is a beloved and protected pastime in this nation, it’s such a worn and evil act antithetical to the All Lives Matter creed. I wrote Surveillance knowing that my work was not new rather it was in the tradition of a police brutality cannon. I wrote fully knowing that at any given time three living generations of Black people and Brown people were stuck in this dark loop of witnessing these deaths and knowing the outcome—grandparents, parents, children all spinning in an intimate, collective memory of violence.

In a 2014 interview, poet Khadijah Queen asked you about coping with distractions to your work and you shared how you found being “swallowed by the mundane” comforting. Examples you gave included “inundating [yourself] with a Big Bang Theory-spring cleaning-pedicure session or reading books in a loud restaurant.” The reading answer made my heart ache for pre-pandemic days, and the relative ease and safety of taking off to sit and read in a crowd, and how that can boost one’s mood and spark creativity.  How have you been coping with the pain and restrictions of the past year?

I’ve found some peace during the pandemic. My full-time position is high stress, and I was relieved to get space from the physical office. I commend the families who sheltered in place and the household leads who managed their personal fears along with those of everyone else in the house. My goodness, what is it like to keep everyone in a household alive and vigilant?! I sat still during the pandemic’s first two seasons. There was such an odd push for normalcy that didn’t feel fair. I shed activities that added more work to my day or didn’t bring me joy. I bought friends’ books to read. I practiced making pralines. I let my hair do what it wanted and took care of my skin since I had the time. I bought a plant that seems to enjoy life and really comfortable pajama sets in which I’ve never invested before. And sometimes I joined friends online. I put meaningful effort into surviving happily.

You have written powerfully about what it’s like to be surveilled not just as a Black person in our society, but as a Black person simply trying to live and be protected in one’s home.  Could you share what “home” means to you now, and how the meaning has possibly changed for you over time?

Home is where my parents reside. That is the first place I knew and understood protection. After the essay you reference was published, my parents shared other instances when we were not safe. They quietly assembled protections for us and refused to let me (as a child, as a teenager, and as a young adult) think I was anything other than protected. Any place that I have lived as an adult, I consider temporary because it is not with my greatest protectors. I’m grateful to all protectors.

You have been an active and committed community leader in the literary arts. What have you learned from this work?

One lesson of many is that publications, activities, and events produced by the literary community come from care. Yes, there are practical and financial reasons for these products, but they are also ways of giving gifts to each other that are long-lasting and memorable. Even curation is an act of care for writers and their audiences.

It’s April 2021.  What gives you hope? What gives you pause?

It took a pandemic to disabuse us of the grind mindset. I am hopeful that we continue prioritizing rest and care for ourselves and others, checking in, protecting personal time. Yes, there are reasons for pause at every turn and life challenges to honor; but I now choose to engage at my pace, to read friends’ books and write for joy. I choose to lean into the wholeness of “no” for self preservation. I get to live a different (better) quality of life.

FPP Interview: I.S. Jones

EDIT-9992In this FPP Interview, I.S. Jones shares how cooking can be a “reprieve from a legacy of blood,” how creating a professional future as a writer who creates spaces and security for other writers is the “work of the heart” she knows would be fulfilling, and much more.  Read her interview then RSVP to join us virtually on Sunday, April 18, 2021 from 6-8pm to hear I.S. Jones read with Ed Baptist, Ashaki Jackson, Kristin Palm, and Alison Stine.

In your poem “Cain” you re-imagine the Biblical characters Cain and Abel as sisters in what, to this reader, is a deeply satisfying reinterpretation. Could you tell us a bit about what inspired you to re-imagine the story this way?

I’ve been writing these poems since 2016 and it still dazzles me how my work reaches people, especially because I was very close to throwing this manuscript [chuckles]. I was still living in Astoria in 2016 with my sister and it was a very tumultuous time. Tr**p was just elected president, I was in a program that was dishonest about funding. I was deeply angry and that’s where “Cain” comes from. I need a safe space to put down my rage, least it goes elsewhere less safe. I also just deeply unsafe as a Black woman in an America that had become very proud to show it was a white supremacist nation. In the center of all that, my relationship with my sister was very brutal and violent. And that’s when the poems were born.

In your poem “Kitchen Work,” the speaker’s hands are “alchemical,” doing what it takes so that “no one goes hungry in my house.” Yet the speaker also declares: “Each of us knows a recipe for poison. I know my sister is allergic to peanut oil.” In this poem, and in so many others, you write profoundly and viscerally about life and death and how our own hands can make the difference. Are there scenes, or lingering images from your own life that you know have driven you to work with these themes?

I love to cook; cooking is one of my unfettered joys in this life. One of my earliest memories in the kitchen is my mother teaching me how to clean whole chicken and fishes. How to crack open a chicken’s ribs, how to descale a fish, how to skin a chicken, how to take out a fish’s red throat. The poem “Kitchen Work” is in the voice of Abel and I find her to be such a fascinating character because everything she understands about touch is inexplicably tied to death, so what if I could complicate her narrative. I think it’s a difficult position to be in: she has to keep killing to earn her keep, to prove her life is of value. In that way, much like myself, the kitchen is her reprieve from a legacy of blood.

Tell us about what “home” means to you. How does “home” differ for you and your other family members? Are the differences reconcilable? Does that matter?

This is a question that comes up in my chapbook. Years ago, Nimrod Journal had a call for poems about “home” and it occurred to me that I didn’t understand what the word means. I missed the deadline, but the question lingered. I’ll be honest with you that I still don’t know what “home” means. Home is my friends, my chosen family. Home is where my books are. Home is Brooklyn for me. Home is where I feel safest.

Your efforts show yourself to be a strong literary arts community builder. What has surprised you about this work?  What has enriched your own work?

Thank you for saying this, it means so much. It’s really the work of the heart for me. Last week I was talking to a teacher about what I wanted to pursue in terms of job prospects once I graduate. I was very frank and said, “I don’t want to teach. At least not in the conventional way.” I know I want the work I do to bring literary arts to larger communities. I want to generate funding for parents so they can have childcare and will have space to pursue their art with financial backing and without stress. I want to create physical space for immigrants seeking asylum. I have, for some time now, have been dreaming of create a multi-cultural space for all women and non-binary femmes called “The Immigrants Daughters Club” where we can share our stories of what it means to be children of immigrants. What surprises me about this work is hearing, “Wow, I need this” or “Thank you for doing this.”

I’m one of the editors for 20.35 Africa and right now we’re launching a fundraiser to be able to pay our staff, contributors, and mentorship program, an idea I pitched to Ebenezer Agu, 20.35 Africa’s founder when I first came onboard. I think about African Letters and the urgency I feel to create what the generation before us did not have and were unable to pass down to us. If I can dream big, and I know I can, I want to make conditions better than they are and pass that legacy onto the generation of writers coming behind me so that they can do even more than I was able to. Does it enrich my own work? Yes, I would say so. As I said, this is work of the heart. This is what I could spend my life doing and I would be fulfilled.

Announcing the Next Lineup for the First Person Plural Reading Series (Virtual) on Sunday, April 18, 2021!

Join us virtually on Sunday, April 18, 2021 from 6-8pm for the next reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Ed Baptist, Ashaki Jackson, I.S. Jones, Kristin Palm, and Alison Stine, hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. Grateful in advance for the fantastic poetry and prose we will hear this night. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. Please RSVP here.

More about the readers:

headshot3Ed Baptist grew up in Durham, North Carolina. He went to DC to attend Georgetown University. One day he was playing pickup basketball in the gym, and John Thompson was watching, but somehow Ed never got an invite to walk-on to the basketball team. So after he received his undergraduate degree he moved on and got his Ph.D. in History at the University of Pennsylvania.  At Cornell, he is Professor in the Department of History.  Together with faculty colleagues from four other universities, Baptist leads Freedom on the Move http://freedomonthemove.org, a collaborative effort to build a crowdsourced database of all North American fugitive slave ads.  The author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, (2014) and Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War (2002), he also co-edited New Studies in the History of American Slavery with the late Stephanie Camp.

BA0A4045-EditDr. Ashaki M. Jackson, a Cave Canem and VONA alumna, is the author of two chapter-length collections — Surveillance (Writ Large Press, 2016) and Language Lesson (Miel, 2016). Currently an Executive Editor at The Offing, she served on the VIDA: Women in Literary Arts Board and mentored for both the PEN USA Emerging Voices program and WriteGirl. Jackson, along with Alyss Dixson and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, also co-founded Women Who Submit, a national community that supports women and nonbinary writers in submitting their literary works to top tier publications. Readers may find her poetry and essays in Obsidian, 7×7 LA, CURA, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Bettering American Poetry, among other publications. She earned her MFA (poetry) from Antioch University Los Angeles and her doctorate (social psychology) from Claremont Graduate University.

EDIT-9992I.S. Jones is a queer American Nigerian poet and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart Pulp, The Rumpus, The Offing, Shade Literary Arts, Blood Orange Review and elsewhere. Her work was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at UW–Madison as well as the Inaugural 2019­­–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship recipient. Her chapbook Spells Of My Name is forthcoming with Newfound in 2021.

KPalmHeadshot2018Kristin Palm is the author of a poetry collection, The Straits, and co-editor of Absent but Present: Voices from the Writer’s Block. Her poetry and essays have also appeared in the anthologies The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, Kindergarde: Avant-garde Stories, Plays, and Songs for Children and Bay Poetics. As a journalist, she has contributed to numerous publications including The New York Times, Metropolis and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has taught writing in schools and community venues in Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area. She lives in Detroit, where she is a freelance writer and editor, nonprofit communications director and co-facilitator of the weekly Writer’s Block poetry workshop at Macomb Correctional Facility.

Alison Stine headshot by Ellee AchtenAlison Stine works as a freelance journalist at The New York Times. Her first novel Road Out of Winter, was published in 2020 (MIRA Books/HarperCollins), and is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Ohio Violence (University of North Texas Press). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, and others. Recipient of grants from the NEA, the Ohio Arts Council, NYU Journalism, and National Geographic, she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her next novel Trashlands will be published by MIRA Books/HarperCollins in October 2021.

About the host:

13166004_10154229341507375_8181859589919330252_nStacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco), was the lead contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath (McSweeney’s), and chronicles stories for The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project. She is a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Nonfiction Literature. Her recent narrative nonfiction has been published in Callaloo, Apogee Journal, The Atlas Review, Cura, Kweli Journal, Nat. Brut, The Nervous Breakdown, The Offing, Phoebe, Silk Road and The Florida Review where the essay was a finalist for the 2014 Editors’ Prize for nonfiction. Originally from Detroit, Le Melle lives in Harlem where she curates the First Person Plural Reading Series. Follow her on Twitter at @stacylemelle.

FPP Interview: Keya Mitra

keya-orange5“Regardless of whether we are writers or not, we have the power to shape our own narratives,” says Keya Mitra in her new FPP Interview. Read further to learn about her current writing projects earning accolades, how hiking 400 miles of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain impacted her body as well as her work, how she eloped during the pandemic, and so much more. Join us Sunday, March 7, 2021, to hear Dr. Mitra read with Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Jennine Capó Crucet, Koritha Mitchell, and Rhonda Welsh. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. Please RSVP here.

You were just named a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction for your novel Human Enough.  Would you tell us about this manuscript and how you first knew you had to write it?

Human Enough is the story of Tasha Patel, an Indian-American immigrant in Portland, Oregon, and her father—with whom she shares a medical condition that causes werewolf-level excessive hair growth. When shaven, they look normal, even beautiful. But when the father back in India gets dementia and leaves the house ungroomed, his neighbors mistake him for an animal and stab him to death. Tasha stops shaving in her grief. Meanwhile, video of the killing goes viral, evoking a visceral sense of complicity in all who watch. It reaches Portland during the 2017 Muslim Ban protests and sets off a solidarity movement centered on now-furry Tasha. People march in full-body suits of fake fur—covering their identities and shedding the weight of their ethnicities. Romance, violence, and a 221-mile pilgrimage ensue.

Right after the 2016 election, I felt more fearful about being a second-generation immigrant than I had in decades. I had six weeks to process my reaction before a scheduled brain surgery that threatened to leave me brain damaged. During that month-and-a-half, I wrote a very rough draft of the novel. When I recovered, I revised the story for years, honing it as a dark, avant-garde comedy. Then after the murder of George Floyd, I deleted the title and 60% of the book and made something sharper, harder, and swifter.

You were also shortlisted for the Dzanc Diverse Voices Prize for your short story collection The Sacred Gifts of Cows and Cheetahs. Please tell us about that project. Is there a particular story from that collection that speaks differently to you from the others? Or speaks differently of you as a writer?

Each story is distinct in its own way, but all the stories share certain themes: trauma, loss, communion, and transcendence. Multiple stories in the collection use idiosyncratic or surprising premises to arrive at essential and universal human truths about suffering and redemption. But I’d say that “The Magnificent Purr” stands out because the premise is particularly far-fetched and comical. A couple attend a retreat in Austin, Texas called The Magnificent Purr. The (very expensive) retreat involves donning cat costumes and refraining from showering, crawling around on all fours, communicating in marriage therapy only through meows, and, ultimately, trying to achieve the elusive purr. Of all the stories, that one might be the most outrageous, and it’s certainly the funniest. Still, it contains some profound moments—the couple attend the retreat in the first place because the narrator’s wife is suffering from a terminal disease, and both are seeking relief and healing. The story was published in the Bellevue Literary Review. That journal features work about illness and healing, and having my work appear in their pages felt so meaningful because the story, while absurdist, is very much about reclaiming our spirits in the midst of pain.

Looking back over your years of writing, are there experiences, or places, that have been particularly impactful on you and your writing, experiences or places that at the time, you didn’t perhaps know were making an impact?

In 2018, I hiked 400 miles of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain—roughly 20 miles a day for three weeks. I started the pilgrimage alone but made friends with other hikers and, alongside them, suffered from blisters and foot infections—everything you’d expect from long-distance hiking. As my body broke down, I talked to myself—quite a bit. Using my iPhone voice notes, I composed a memoir and dictated a hundred pages for the next draft of Human Enough. But more than the pages, I was transformed by the communal suffering and joy, and the sense of communion that came out of that. My fellow pilgrims almost all experienced pain, mourning, and/or displacement before embarking on the hike. I’ll never forget the openness of the conversations I had during that time, and the sense of connection we all experienced in the midst of our struggles. That transcendence has informed a lot of my writing—my fiction and nonfiction—since.

As a longtime professor of creative writing, is there guidance you’ve offered others that feels particularly true right now?

Regardless of whether we are writers or not, we have the power to shape our own narratives. A story that seems disempowering can be reframed to one that uplifts—James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a wonderful example. In that short story, Baldwin writes exquisitely about generations of pain and prejudice, and yet he ends with the story with a moment of connection and hope without losing sight of the ongoing nature of struggle.

I also emphasize, in both my literature and creative writing classes, that we need a diversity of stories—multiple perspectives on the same world, on ourselves and the consequences of our actions and the possibilities we may not know how to see on our own.

I show Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of the Single Story” to nearly all of my classes. Now more than ever, her words about the capacity of language to both dehumanize and empower feel essential and true. Only through challenging our “single stories” of one another can we connect with greater humanity and empathy.

It is March 2021, the month we mark one year since the first cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed in this country. What about this past year has been most challenging for you?  What has given you hope?

It has been a difficult time to be immunocompromised on many levels. My husband and I had to postpone a wedding. We had to devise safe ways to join protests. We had health scares and real emergencies and wildfire smoke that made the outside air unbreathable. But more than anything, the year has underscored how much I have to be grateful for. In August, my husband and I eloped in the mountains during a backpacking trip in the Wallowas (Oregon). We wouldn’t have gotten married that way without the pandemic, and yet it was one of the most joyous and otherworldly experiences of my life. We’ve been newlyweds on lockdown, and all this upheaval has brought us closer.

I’ve also been amazed by the resilience, good will, and creativity of those around me, particularly in the teaching profession. It’s inspiring.

What does the future hold?

So many hopes.

FPP Interview: Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk

Brilliant Books TC 4.2018In this 2021 FPP interview with Dr. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Bohnhorst Blackhawk speaks of spending an hour in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, of how she reclaimed her maiden name, of writing advice she finds most true, and so much more.  Join us on Sunday, March 7, 2021 to hear Bohnhorst Blackhawk read with Jennine Capó Crucet, Koritha Mitchell, Keya Mitra, and Rhonda Welsh. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. Please RSVP here.

After decades of living and writing in Detroit, Michigan, you now live and write outside of New Haven, Connecticut.  How has your new region and home impacted your writing, if at all?

It’s been a huge change for me and I don’t deny that it’s taken some getting used to. I am quite comfortable here, but leaving Detroit meant leaving a source of so much passion – many dear friends, fellow poets, my work with InsideOut, being a Kresge fellow and part of the incredibly vibrant cultural life of the city, the Detroit River, living and birding on the flyway, and memories of my beloved Neil Frankenhauser, the artist whose ashes we scattered in Toledo’s Maumee River in November 2019.  It’s great to be close to family here, but I doubt I’ll ever have as passionate an attachment to a place as my connection to Detroit.

Before Covid, however, since being here gives easy access to New York City, I visited frequently. I also frequent Amherst MA from time to time, the site of Emily Dickinson’s family home and museum. I’ve made a number of ‘pilgrimages’ there to take part in programs, overnighting sometimes at the Amherst Inn, which is directly across the street from Her home. I wrote a recent poem, “In Her Chamber,” after spending an hour in Her bedroom, an experience one can purchase as a fundraiser for the museum. That poem is collected in my fifth full-length collection One Less River, which came out in 2019 from Mayapple Press. It’s the only New England poem in the collection; the first section is all poems about Detroit. I’ve been very lucky here to find some fine poetry friends, who have been lifelines, and I have a poem just out in Waking Up To The Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis, a terrific anthology that along with the friendships makes me happy to be a Connecticut poet as well.

Please tell us about your current book-in-progress called “American Mercy.” Is there a founding story, or image, that guides you?

I’ve actually put that title to the side. I had thought about it as having to do with probing the nature of love, or its absence, at both a personal and a social justice level, with an emphasis on what Desiree Cooper has labeled “Writing While White,” but my current energies have been pulled more directly into poems about Neil, whom I still grieve tremendously. I have his paintings here in CT with me, and he is still very present in my heart, so I have been working and reworking a chapbook about him. The title is Maumee, Maumee, after what he called his “sacred” river where he would go day after day to sit and paint en plein air.  Some poems from this collection were finalists for the Joy Harjo Prize from Cutthroat Magazine, and another received a Pushcart Prize nomination from Negative Capability, so I’m hopeful that the manuscript will find a publisher.

Many of us have long known you as Dr. Terry Blackhawk, but recently you’ve reclaimed your maiden name Bohnhorst. Would you share a bit as to why you’ve made this choice?

Well, here’s a fun fact: I didn’t marry into Blackhawk. In 1970, in Detroit, I married Evans Charley, a member of the Te-moak Band of Western Shoshone from Nevada. Our son Ned [Blackhawk], the Yale historian, is also an enrolled member. Ned Charley was an adorable six-year-old when his dad decided to change his name (and thus our family name) to something more reflective of his heritage. We divorced in 2005, but by then I had already established myself as a poet and nonprofit arts leader under the name Blackhawk. I got used to it, although when people wondered about its origin, I would sometimes say, “I’m the white lady with the Indian name.”  A few months ago, however, when a member of my Unitarian congregation here in Connecticut approached me to ask how I “identify” (meaning which tribe), I realized that it was time to ward off any more confusion.  I think the Bohnhorst Blackhawk combination is the best way to do that.

In 2016’s The Whisk and Whir of Wings we find a collection of some of your favorite bird poems written over the years. How do you experience the “whisk and whir” in your current living and writing?

I’d have to say the whisk & whir is mostly in memory now. That is, for the meantime at least, I guess I’m a rather lapsed birder. Not that Connecticut isn’t a fabulous place for birding. The shore of Long Island sound is especially wonderful.  I’ve joined the CT Audubon and have explored some of the nature preserves, but I don’t have the energy for it that I once had. I am also the owner of a sweet little mixed poodle rescue dog, Max, who came into our family a few years ago and has become mine full time. Thanks to him, I walk a couple of miles every day, but walking a dog and birding do not go hand in hand.

Is there creative work by others that is inspiring you of late?

Over the last year or so, I’ve spent a lot of time writing blurbs for others. I think I’m going to call a halt to it, but it’s been great to get to know new collections by Judith Kerman, Derek Pollard, Jude Marr, and Mary Minock. And I can’t resist sharing my blurb for Pete Markus’s new and very moving collection, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, coming out from Wayne State University Press in a couple of months. It’s great to bookend this FPP series with Mr. Pete – you’re lucky to have him! — and I know you’ll be as moved by the poems as I am. He wrote them as a record, to capture his daily process of grieving after his father died.  He shared the poems with me privately before the press accepted them, and they were a real solace as I grieved Neil’s death. Others have also found that kind of comfort from the collection.  So I don’t mind giving you a sneak peek at the blurb.  Here it is.  Walk the river with Peter Markus in his daily homage to his father. Take in the levees, the fish, the abandoned steel mill, the birds, the river air his father will no longer breathe—all rendered with steady wonder and “the clarity that death brings.” And take comfort. Rather than “let silence have its way with grief,” Markus gives us—in poems as translucent as the clearest river water—“no better way to say goodbye.”

After many years of teaching, and of leading and training other teachers and writers-in-the-classroom, you have given all kinds of instruction and advice for those wishing to develop their craft as poets and writers. Is there any advice that stands out to you now, that you think is most true?

I guess the main thing is for writers to get out of their own way, that is, to stay open to surprise and discovery and not get bogged down trying to make particular points. E. M. Forster’s “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” was a favorite classroom mantra of mine, and I often urged my students, when they would stare off into space as if searching for inspiration on the ceiling, by saying “Don’t think. Write!”  I believe that writing itself overcomes the fear of writing. It generates new connections and unexpected ways of saying things.  When a piece of writing feels safe or stale, I suspect that the writer is going over old ground and not, as Gertrude Stein would say, allowing “creation (to) take place between the pen and the paper, rather than beforehand in a thought.” I think that Peter Markus’s method of writing must follow or flow in this way, which might account for the purity and translucence of his work.

It is March 2021, the month we mark one year since the first cases of Covid-19 were known in this country. What about this past year has been most challenging for you?  What has given you hope?

Keeping track of time has been the most challenging for me. In the summer I got together out of doors quite regularly with poet friends, which was a pleasure, but since the weather changed I haven’t gone out much, except to walk. One day blends into the next and the “before times” feel like a different life altogether. I’ve been able to stay in frequent touch with friends, though, which helps tremendously. And I’ve luckily been in a safe “bubble” with my son, new daughter-in-law and new grandson, and I see my older grandchildren regularly enough to make life very sweet indeed.  The stupidity and venality of a huge section of the US electorate and their chosen “jefe” has, of course, filled me with dread, but the Biden administration’s resourcefulness and compassion do give me hope.

What does the future hold?

I kept a little apartment in Detroit, close to the Detroit River and the Eastern Market, so once the pandemic lifts I hope to be able to get back there at least a couple of times a year.  I just completed my vaccinations, but I’m not in a big hurry to fly. I guess I’m still in a holding pattern, like the rest of us!

 

Announcing the Next Lineup for the First Person Plural Reading Series (Virtual) on Sunday, March 7, 2021!

Join us virtually on Sunday, March 7, 2021 from 6-8pm for the next reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Jennine Capó Crucet, Koritha Mitchell, Keya Mitra, and Rhonda Welsh and hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. This reading promises to be an extraordinary night full of remarkable poetry, prose, and scholarship. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. Please RSVP here.

More about the readers:

Brilliant Books TC 4.2018

A 2019 inductee into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame, former high school creative writing teacher Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project in 1995 to bring the power of poetry and literary self-expression to youth in Detroit classrooms and communities. Blackhawk’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and online at Poetry Daily, The Collagist, Interim, ONE, Verse Daily and elsewhere. Awards for poetry include seven Pushcart nominations, the Foley Poetry Award, and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod International. She was twice named Michigan Creative Writing Teacher of the Year by the Michigan Youth Arts Festival and is a Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow. Her five full-length poetry collections include Escape Artist (BkMk Press, 2003), selected by Molly Peacock for the John Ciardi Prize, and The Light Between (Wayne State University Press, 2012). Her first book body & field (Michigan State University Press, 1999) was a finalist for the Larry Levis, Four Way Books Intro and New Issues Awards, among others. One Less River (Mayapple Press, 2019) was on two best-seller lists in October 2019 and was named a 2019 BEST INDIE POETRY title by Kirkus Reviews. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk holds a B.A. from Antioch College and a Ph.D. and an Honorary Doctorate from Oakland University.  In 1992-1993, she received a Teacher-Scholar sabbatical award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the life and work of Emily Dickinson and has published poems, essays, and encyclopedia entries on the poet.  Other areas of inspiration include bird watching, mythology, and visual art and artists. She is currently working on a collection of poems entitled Maumee, Maumee memorializing the life and work of her beloved partner, Toledo artist Neil Frankenhauser (1939-2019).

Screen Shot 2021-02-13 at 7.08.51 PMJennine Capó Crucet is the author of Make Your Home Among Strangers, winner of the International Latino Book Award and cited as a best book of the year by NBC Latino, the Guardian, and the Miami Herald; and of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the John Gardner Book Prize. A Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times and a recipient of an O. Henry Prize, she is currently an associate professor at the University of Nebraska. Her essay collection, My Time Among the Whites, was published by Picador in September 2019.

Mitchell, Standing, Smiling OutdoorsKoritha Mitchell is an award-winning author, cultural critic, and associate professor of English at Ohio State University. Her first book, Living with Lynching, won awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her second monograph, From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture, appeared in August 2020 and was named a Best Book of 2020 by Ms. Magazine. She is also editor of the Broadview Edition of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy, and her scholarly articles include “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie,” published by American Quarterly, and “Love in Action,” which appeared in Callaloo and draws parallels between lynching and violence against LGBTQ communities. Her commentary has appeared in outlets such as CNN, Good Morning America, The Huffington Post, NBC News, PBS Newshour, and NPR’s Morning Edition. On Twitter, she’s @ProfKori.

Keya1Keya Mitra is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at Pacific University, where she received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018. Her short story collection has been a finalist for the 2020 Dzanc Books’ Diverse Voices Prize, the Bakeless Prize, the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award, and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and a semifinalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her fiction was recognized under “Other Distinguished Stories” in Best American Short Stories 2018 and has appeared in the Bennington Review, The Kenyon Review, Arts and Letters, The Bellevue Literary Review, Moss, The Southwest Review, Slush Pile, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, Confrontation, Aster(ix) and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. Her nonfiction is forthcoming in Witness Magazine and was the runner-up for the 2021 Witness Magazine Literary Awards. She has completed two novels as well as a short-story collection and memoir. Dr. Mitra has received a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, worked as a fiction editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts for two years and is the co-editor-in-chief of the literary journal Silk Road Review: A Literary Crossroads. She graduated in 2010 with a doctorate and MFA from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, this after spending a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing.

rhondasmileRhonda Welsh’s approach to poetry is similar to the way musicians approach music. “My poetry is meant to be heard. I always think about the rhythm and the flow of the words. That is as important to me as the message,” she says.

The only poet asked to perform during the Detroit Institute of Arts Re-opening ceremonies, her two-week retrospective of African and African-American poetry was a “must-see” during the donor and the community opening festivities. She has been featured at numerous other metro Detroit venues including The Carr Center, the Detroit Opera House, the Scarab Club, Detroit Artists Market, 5E Gallery, the Wright Museum, Campus Martius, Wayne State University, the Ford Performing and Community Arts Center, College for Creative Studies, Southfield Public Library, Casino Windsor and Marygrove College. And, like many poets, she has performed in countless coffee houses and gallery spaces throughout the Detroit area; nationwide in venues from NYC to Rock Springs, Wyoming to LA and internationally as an author at the Windsor Book Fair and the Quebec Writers’ Federation Retreat.

A native Detroiter with a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Public Relations and Organizational Communication, in 2006 she self-produced her debut CD, I Saw Myself. In 2010, she released her debut poetry collection, Red Clay Legacy. This effort was met with glowing reviews including a particularly moving one from one of her poetic inspirations, Nikki Giovanni, “Rhonda Welsh offers us a poetic view of the strength and beauty of the people of Red Clay — true Earth — the beginning. Whether a love poem or a question of giving, this poet steps up to the plate, hitting a home run! We welcome this voice to the poetic discourse.”

Rhonda resides in metro Detroit and you can visit her at rhondwelsh.com.

About the host:

13166004_10154229341507375_8181859589919330252_nStacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco), was the lead contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath (McSweeney’s), and chronicles stories for The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project. She is a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Nonfiction Literature. Her recent narrative nonfiction has been published in Callaloo, Apogee Journal, The Atlas Review, Cura, Kweli Journal, Nat. Brut, The Nervous Breakdown, The Offing, Phoebe, Silk Road and The Florida Review where the essay was a finalist for the 2014 Editors’ Prize for nonfiction. Originally from Detroit, Le Melle lives in Harlem where she curates the First Person Plural Reading Series. Follow her on Twitter at @stacylemelle.

FPP Interview: Sara Lippmann

SaraDrink2In this FPP Interview with fiction writer Sara Lippmann we learn how the “urgency and alienation and erasure” she felt as a new mother pushed her to create her short story collection Doll Palace, how people have given her “all kinds of shit” for her writing, how characters’ bad choices are often “what makes fiction compelling,” and so much more. Join us on Sunday, January 17th for “The Way Forward,” to hear Sara Lippmann read live, via Zoom, with writers Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Desiree C. Bailey, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Max S. Gordon, Sara Lippmann, Gloria Nixon-John and Samantha So Lamb and Alex Torres who will be memorializing Anthony Veasna So. RSVP here.  – SPL

In your short story collection Doll Palace and in stories published since, you tell the stories of women and girls in such profound ways that readers experience the good, the bad, and the ugly of our lives. What first motivated you to tell your stories?  Is that how you still feel today?

Screen Shot 2021-01-12 at 6.13.51 PMI’ve been obsessed with writing since high school but there is a difference between wanting to write and having something to say. So while a love of language might have first drawn me to the page, it’s taken longer to develop voice and to embrace impulses of story.

Doll Palace came out of an urgency and alienation and erasure I felt as a new mother. I remember strangers touching my belly when I was pregnant with my first kid — as if a woman’s body becomes public domain. Wield a stroller on the sidewalk and there’s no shortage of those who know better. And so the stories in some way are in direct conversation with that. My new collection, JERKS, is both a deepening and an extension of those themes. Characters feel trapped by their circumstances and their choices, by societal expectations and systems. But whereas Doll Palace is arguably grimmer and more static, JERKS features more quiet rebellions and uses dark humor and lots of lust and desire to chip away the confines that hold us back from our own selfhood, and freedom.

I was listening to an episode of the New Yorker fiction podcast this morning where Chang-rae Lee reads a Steven Millhauser story and in the conversation with Deborah Treisman that follows he says, “the genius of all great writers is they show us something about reality that disturbs and disorients” and although I would never in a million years put myself in the Millhauser stratosphere but I would say that what I’m trying to do is expose a reality that is often glossed over or brushed under the rug — and yes, it’s sometimes hard and sometimes tender and rarely pretty.

Do you ever encounter resistance to your topics or to your narrators? Or, do you ever find readers get uneasy with the truths of your stories?

I’ve gotten all kinds of shit for my writing. What does your husband think? Your family? Your children? It’s all enraging. My characters are not particularly “likable” —  which, don’t get me started. Philip Roth once said, “Literature is not a moral beauty contest,” which is something I return to again and again. Not as an excuse or pass for irresponsible fiction. I have no patience for hateful characters, but I’m also not interested in characters who always take the moral high road. I am resistant to didactic or moralistic storytelling, unless it is somehow subverting a fableistic trope. My characters make bad choices. My characters let their jagged seams hang out and unravel. That, to me, is what makes fiction compelling. I’ve certainly been told my writing is crass and unsavory among other things which only makes me want to double down on that aspect of humanity. Not to provoke. Not for the sake of exhibitionism. But because I want to tell honest stories.

Has your storytelling changed over time?  If so, how?

Over time, I’d say my work has become more honest. Yes, I’ve always written fiction. But the stories must ring true. Every sentence has to feel honest and true with a clear sense of imperative. Often this entails paring back on language I’ve gotten carried away with. The older I get, the less tolerant I’ve become of language for the sake of language. Nothing is precious. I’ve gotten a bit better at being less self conscious, at getting out of my own damn way. Sentences without a focused point of view are just words. If the writing is not in direct service to the story it gets cut.

As the First Person Plural Reading Series, we’ve always been interested in what it means to be “we” – with all of its promises, power, and problems.  When do you feel most “we” and when do you feel most “I”? Does it matter?

I am a big sucker for a first person plural story. I often draft longhand so I try not to censor myself in whatever voice comes out and it’s sometimes slippery, like I’ll move from I to you to we in morning pages all the time. I’ve published a couple of stories using a collective we — which often slips in when talking about mothers and women and girls. I like to play with assumptions placed upon these groups and also to subvert them. To embody the collective and to challenge it, to bristle against its confines. Erasure happens when you are lumped into a category, so it’s important to locate the individual in the we. In JERKS, there is a story called Har-True that moves between first person plural and singular. I also think the collective lends itself well to flash (“Aromatherapy” and “Father’s Day” are two micro examples of that). There is so much to unpack. While there can be power in the plural there is also a danger of homogeneity. Two sides of a coin. One the one hand, a collective lends support and company. But there can also be peer pressure and mob mentality. Sometimes I watch both of these patterns play out on Twitter.

Is there a community (or a “we”) that is sustaining you now?

The writing community — both at large and immediate — sustains me. My students. Writing is lonely enough business, and it’s so easy to feel even more disconnected and disaffected right now when we can’t go anywhere, that I am incredibly grateful for writers I connect with online — and on the phone. And even on zoom, though I loathe it. I haven’t met with my own writing group in person for over a year but we started holding each other accountable to our own progress on longer projects and these daily check-ins and cheers are getting me through. I don’t know where I’d be without them.

FPP Interview: Samantha So Lamb

Screen Shot 2020-12-29 at 5.58.11 PMWe only mark in days, weeks how long it’s been since writer Anthony Veansa So passed away. I identified him as a writer in that first sentence, but he was of course a son, a brother, a partner, an uncle, a friend, and so much more to the communities that mourn him. Anthony had committed to reading at “The Way Forward” right before his death. I asked his elder sister Samantha So Lamb and his partner Alex Torres to read and memorialize Anthony as part of the night. In this interview, Samantha shares what her grief has been like so far, what it was like to have Anthony as her brother, and what it was like to read his work in-depth for the first time. We welcome you to join us on Sunday, January 17th for “The Way Forward,” to hear Samantha and Alex. They will participate with writers Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Desiree C. Bailey, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Max S. Gordon, Sara Lippmann, and Gloria Nixon-John. RSVP here.  – SPL

Do you feel you’ve been able to grieve as necessary? Has anything surprised you about your grief?

Anthony was my only brother and we were very close. He also was the only son for my traditional Cambodian parents. When he passed, my parents were devastated and still are.

imageI had to step up in the first 3 weeks following his death. I planned the funeral – we did a mix of traditional Cambodian rituals tailored to a pandemic and modern American burial norms. In the moment, I was in disbelief that I was burying my younger brother, during the COVID-19 pandemic, while his book was starting to get recognition, and having to do it with Cambodian traditional funeral beliefs. I was not equipped to do any of that. It never crossed my mind that I would have to bury my brother. I haven’t been to any funerals during the COVID-19 pandemic. I didn’t know that his work was so well received (he never shared it with us). Most of all, the last time I attended a traditional Cambodian funeral was when my aunt died when I was 12. I had no idea what I was doing.

Everything worked out in the end and we wrapped up all of the funeral rituals days before Christmas. It wasn’t until after Christmas, when everyone went home and life turned to normal, was when the grief started. Grief does weird things like unlock trauma that has been buried deep down inside. I think that has been the most surprising, that the grief has opened up something deeper that I will need to seek additional help for.

Tell us about Anthony as your brother.

Anthony was the best brother, uncle, and son my family could ever ask for.  He was always the most reliable, although he was sometimes questionable on his timing. When I would inevitably ask him to do a favor he would never complain, at least not about doing favors…and at least not directly to my face. On the day of my engagement party, he drove across Stockton to pick up my favorite dessert which I absolutely had to have (and it tasted all the more amazing because he did it just for me).  On another occasion, I remember, after feverishly scouring Craigslist from Oakland to Richmond for a specific $22 Ikea chair, I was able to locate one in San Francisco for $7. I convinced my brother, on a Thursday evening, to drive to a random stranger’s apartment in the Mission, with cash, to pick up said chair, and bring it all the way back to my house in Pinole and he did it, without hesitation. That was sibling dedication.

Anthony was a devoted uncle to our son, Oliver. He loved to sing “Baby Shark” to Oliver extremely off-beat, on purpose, usually while glancing at me to make sure I was thoroughly annoyed. He always said that he would never have children himself. Instead, he would choose one of mine to be his favorite, send them to a fancy private school, and potentially fund their Olympic fencing career as a means of becoming a Stanford legacy admit.

Years from now, we will tell our children how free-spirited, fun and hard-working he was. Seriously, he was his own spirit, you should have seen him dance at my wedding. I’ve never seen anyone actually dance like Charlie Brown from Peanuts.

What do you love most about Anthony’s work?

Screen Shot 2021-01-10 at 5.41.36 PMWhen I read Anthony’s work, it is so personal and real. I can read parts of his story and know where he spun the story from, what memory he took from our childhood, what character traits he gathered from our family. On one hand, it is fiction. On the other hand, it is my family’s story told from his perspective. It takes me back to a place that gives me a warm feeling but it also pains me because he reveals feelings he has never told me or my family before. Reading some of his pieces over the past weeks has made me realize just how much he loved my family, how he was inspired by their stories, and how he had found his true calling in being a voice for Cambodian Americans, specifically from Stockton.  For that, he makes me proud to be his sister.

What is something we should take with us on the way forward?

I know what I will be taking on my way forward through this traumatic time of my life. I will hug my partner every single night, I will tell my son I love him every single day.  I will take risks in my career, use up my vacation time, and won’t be afraid to use a mental health day. As an educator, I will pay more attention to my LGBTQ students. I will practice more mindful strategies with them, as well as advocate for social-emotional awareness.

 

The Way Forward

Join us virtually on Sunday, January 17th, 2021 for “The Way Forward,” a reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Desiree C. Bailey, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Max S. Gordon, Sara Lippmann, Gloria Nixon-John, and Samantha So Lamb and Alex Torres who will read in memory of Anthony Veasna So. The reading is curated and hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. This is our fifth annual post-election reading, but instead of our focus being on “what just happened?” our readers will share work that speaks to what we must hold on to, what we must seek, what we must know and learn and feel as we find our way forward. The reading is from 6-8pm. Admission is free.

Please RSVP via Eventbrite here. You will be sent log-in instructions prior to the event.

About the readers:

ibrahim_west coast smile_Ibrahim is a bright, playful spirit who authentically reflects and acts on bold questions. His artful blending of idealism and spiritual commitment with pragmatic application has led him into government, public administration, parenthood, and media. His unique voice has helped elevate the environmental vision of Islam, the spiritual opportunity of parenting, and the cultural and political side of sports and the ethical imperative when considering decisions about how we manage land, waters, and open space.

Ibrahim Abdul-Matin is an urban strategist whose work focuses on deepening democracy and improving public engagement. He has advised two mayors on the best ways to translate complex decisions related to the cost, impacts, and benefits of environmental policy on communities. He is the founder of Green Squash Consulting a management consulting firm based in New York that works with people, organizations, companies, coalitions and governments committed to equity and justice. He is the author of Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet and in addition to the New York Advisory Board of the Trust for Public Land he is sits on the board of the International Living Future Institute encouraging the creation of a regenerative built environment and Sapelo Square whose mission is to celebrate and analyze the experiences of Black Muslims in the United States.

DesireeCBaileyHeadshot_CreditWiltonScherekaDesiree C. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’clock Press, 2016) and has short stories and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, the Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. Desiree was born in Trinidad and Tobago, and grew up in Queens, NY.

IMG_3019Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. Roberto’s third collection, [Elegies], is published by Flower Song Press and his second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books.  Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press.

His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Root, Those People, Rigorous, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Gawker, Barrelhouse, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, and many others.

He is founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books Publishing, A NonProfit Corp.

A native New Yorker, Roberto holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

max .JPG pic for StaceyMax S. Gordon is a writer and activist. His work has also appeared on openDemocracy, Democratic Underground and Truthout, in Z Magazine, Gay Times, Sapience, and other progressive on-​line and print magazines in the U.S. and internationally.  His essays include “The Eroticism of Brutality – On Mary Trump’s ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man’ and “How We’ll Get Over: Going to The Upper Room with Donald Trump.”

IMG-1665Sara Lippmann is the author of the story collections Doll Palace, long-listed for the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and JERKS (forthcoming from Mason Jar Press.) She was awarded an artist’s fellowship in fiction from New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Millions, Fourth Genre, Slice Magazine, Diagram, Epiphany and elsewhere. She’s landed on Wigleaf’s Top 50, and her stories have been anthologized in Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting (San Diego City Works Press) and forthcoming in New Voices: Contemporary Voices Confronting the Holocaust (Blue Lyra Press) and Best Small Fictions 2020 (Sonder Press). Raised outside of Philadelphia, she lives and teaches in Brooklyn and co-hosts the Sunday Salon NYC.

Screen Shot 2020-12-29 at 8.26.15 PMGloria Nixon-John, Ph.D.  Gloria’s novel The Killing Jar is based on the true story of one of the youngest Americans to have served on death row.  Her memoir entitled Learning from Lady Chatterley is written in narrative verse and is set in Post WWII Detroit.  Her chapbook, Breathe me a Sky, was recently published by The Moonstone Art Center of Philadelphia.  She has published poetry, fiction, and essays in several literary journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by A3 of London. Many of her essays and poems deal with her love of gardening, and with her love of, and care for, her horses.

Gloria has collected an oral history of sculptor Marshall Fredericks for The Marshall Fredrick’s museum in Saginaw Michigan and has done oral history work for the Theodore Roethke House, also in Saginaw, Michigan.  She currently works as an independent writing consultant for schools, libraries, and individual writers. Gloria lives in rural Oxford, Michigan with her horses, dogs, cats, husband Michael.

imageAs Anthony Veasna So agreed to read for “The Way Forward” just days before he passed away in San Francisco, CA, I am grateful to be able to keep Anthony as part of the lineup in order to remember him and to honor his work. He will be memorialized by his sister Samantha So Lamb and his partner Alex Torres. – SPL

Anthony Veasna So (deceased) is a graduate of Stanford University and earned his MFA in Fiction at Syracuse University. His debut story collection, Afterparties, is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins in August 2021, and his writing has been or will be published in The New Yorker, n+1, Granta, and ZYZZYVA. Born and raised in Stockton, CA, he lived in San Francisco, where he worked on an essay collection and a stoner novel of queer ideas about three Khmer American cousins—a pansexual rapper, a comedian philosopher, and a leftist illustrator.

Screen Shot 2020-12-29 at 5.58.11 PMSamantha So Lamb was born and raised in Stockton, California. Her parents are Cambodian refugees who escaped the Khmer Rouge. First in her family to graduate from college, Samantha decided to become a teacher. She dedicates her career to teaching elementary grades in urban neighborhoods and deeply believes in equitable access to rigorous education for all students, especially black and brown children. She currently lives and teaches in Richmond, California with her husband, her son, and dog.

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Alex Torres has taught English in Bogotá, Colombia as a Fulbright Scholar, reported on venture capitalists & startups for Business Insider, and published academic research on nineteenth and twentieth-century US literary culture.

 

 

Curator and Host:

13166004_10154229341507375_8181859589919330252_nStacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco), was the lead contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath (McSweeney’s), and chronicles stories for The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project.  She is a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Nonfiction Literature. Her recent narrative nonfiction has been published in Callaloo, Apogee Journal, The Atlas Review, Callaloo, Cura, Kweli Journal, Nat. Brut, The Nervous Breakdown, The Offing, Phoebe, Silk Road and The Florida Review where the essay was a finalist for the 2014 Editors’ Prize for nonfiction. Originally from Detroit, Le Melle lives in Harlem where she curates the First Person Plural Reading Series. Follow her on Twitter at @stacylemelle.