New Work by Tung-Hui Hu at "Absent"

Tung-Hui Hu

A MANIFESTO IS AN INVOICE

Parachute silk, iron ore, gasoline, exclamation marks—we used them to exclaim about the men that were rationed, too.With two women for every man, each allotted cards, the youngest, most fertile, first, we spoke shyly, our eyes flashing, when hearing the words manpower, manhunts, mandates, manifestoes.

The function of a manifesto is to name names, to decide who’s in and who’s out, who’s arrived and who’s late to the party. Packaged in the relentless emotion of a PowerPoint presentation, literary manifestoes are concerned with logistics, with product, with time to delivery. They are meant for upwardly mobile people diagramming their network of influence. They speak to the middle managers of poetry, third-tier literary magazines, people “in the know”: they are the ultimate back-office solution.

Read the entire piece here:
http://absentmag.org/?p=8

Natasha Trethewey's "Native Guard" Inspires Symposium at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art

Coast native’s book inspires symposium
By Pam Firmin - pfirmin@sunherald.com

An exhibit and symposium inspired by the title poem in Natasha Trethewey’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize–winning book “The Native Guard” will debut Jan. 9 as “The Native Guard: A Photographic History of Ship Island’s African American Regiment,” the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art announced Thursday.

Trethewey will be guest of honor at the exhibit’s opening reception and book signing from 6 to 8 p.m. Jan. 9 at the museum, 1596 Glenn Swetman St., Biloxi. At the symposium, which is the next day from 9 a.m. until noon at Bancorp South, she will read from “The Native Guard.” Both events are free but symposium seating is limited to 75 so reservations are suggested.

The exhibit will be up through Feb. 20.

Read the entire article here:
http://www.sunherald.com/arts/story/1026062.html

Natasha Trethewey on "The Atlanta Forum Network"

The Georgia Review: Natasha Trethewey and Stephen Dunn

Cosponsored by The Georgia Review, the Margaret Mitchell House welcomes Pulitzer prize-winning poets Natasha Trethewey and Stephen Dunn.Trethewey's most recent collection is Native Guard, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. A professor at Emory University, 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. Her poetry collections include Domestic Work and Bellocq's Ophelia. Dunn is the author of 16 books, including Different Hours, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Since 1974 he has taught at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, where he is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing. Dunn is the recipient of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and three NEA Creative Writing Fellowships.

Read the entire article and watch or listen to the reading here:
http://www.pba.org/afn/event.php?forumEventId=2104

Camille Dungy to Read on December 13th with Damon Brown at "Writers with Drinks"

Camille Dungy and Damon Brown @ Writers With Drinks

	The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St., SF
	December 13, 2008, 19:30 to 21:30
	$3-$5 sliding scale
	Charlie Jane Anders

Award-winning reading series "Writers With Drinks" returns, with an extra nerd-tastic lineup of science fiction, fantasy and video games. Plus amazing poetry and deadpan comedy.

When: Saturday, December 13, 2008, 7:30 to 9:30 PM, doors open at 7:00 PM
Who: Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, Damon Brown, Steve Ferris and Camille T. Dungy
Where: The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St. between Mission and Valencia, San Francisco
How much: $3 to $5 sliding scale, all proceeds benefit the CSC.

Read the entire article here:
https://secure.ocf.berkeley.edu/~qrc/event_detail.php?eventid=379

Natasha Trethewey to Read on December 11th with H.C. Porter

Event featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, local artist set for Dec. 11

By Megan Holland

Sunday, December 7, 2008 6:50 AM CST

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Gulfport native Natasha Trethewey will join local artist H.C. Porter Thursday for Native Daughters: Conversations on Poetry, an event to highlight their collaboration on Porter’s new book, “Backyards & Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories.”

Trethewey will open with a poetry reading, then the artists will discuss the book, for which Trethewey wrote the foreword. The publication was released in November as a companion piece to Porter’s traveling exhibit, Backyards & Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories — The First Year After Katrina.

“I am very grateful to Mississippi’s daughter and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey for bringing her voice to Vicksburg for this event,” said Porter, who operates a gallery on Washington Street. “She is a poet of unsurpassed talent and honors who was gracious enough to lend her words to our ‘Backyards & Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories’ project.”

Read the entire story here:
http://www.vicksburgpost.com/articles/2008/12/07/features/doc49393a127a08e854064005.txt

Camille Dungy to Read on December 3rd with Oscar Bermeo, and DeWayne Dickerson

Poetry reading by Camille Dungy, Oscar Bermeo, and DeWayne Dickerson
FREE! (Please BYOB)
Wednesday, December 3rd, 7:30pm
Books & Bookshelves
99 Sanchez Street, SF
(415)621-3761
booksandbookshelves.blogspot.com

Camille T. Dungy is the author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), a finalist for the PEN Center USA 2007 Literary Award and the Library of Virginia 2007 Literary Award. She is assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Dungy has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Cave Canem, the Dana Award, and the American Antiquarian Society. A graduate of Stanford University and the MFA program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, and other publications. She lives in San Francisco, Calif., where she serves as an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. A co-founder of From the Fishouse, she is currently president of the board of directors, and co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (forthcoming in spring 2009 from Persea Books), edited with Jeffrey Thomson and Matt O’Donnell.

Read the full release here:
http://bjanepr.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/books-and-bookshelves-presents-camille-dungy-oscar-bermeo-and-dewayne-dickerson/

Dan Albergotti at "Southern Spaces"

Shadows along the Waccamaw

Dan Albergotti, Coastal Carolina University

Overview:

Dan Albergotti reads five poems in and around his current home of Conway, South Carolina, in locations that include the Waccamaw River and nearby Pawley's Island. For Albergotti, the natural world allows explorations of beauty, love, serendipity, and death. His poems also examine the "emotional landscape of denial" that marked his childhood and youth.

See the entire presentation here:
http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2008/albergotti/1a.htm

14th Annual "Will Read for Food" Benefit Reading for Greensboro Charities

The 14th anniversary of "Will Read for Food", the annual program of readings by local authors to benefit Greensboro charities, was held Thursday, November 20th, at the Weatherspoon Auditorium as The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Featured writers were Michael Parker, Stuart Dischell, Craig Nova, Terry Kennedy, Jennifer Grotz, Mark Smith-Soto, Allison Seay, and Lee Zacharias. The event raised $1,100 for the Glen Haven Community Development Center, which serves immigrant and refugee populations.

The event was recorded and photographed by Tina Firesheets and Jerry Wolford of the Greensboro News & Record.

Listen to each of the readings here:

http://webmedia.news-record.com/legacy/indepth/08/poet_writers/

A. Van Jordan Wins $50,000 USA Fellowship

UNITED STATES ARTISTS ANNOUNCES THIRD ANNUAL USA FELLOWSHIPS

CHICAGO, IL, November 10, 2008—United States Artists (USA), the national artists’ advocacy organization, today announced the recipients of fifty USA Fellowships for 2008 totaling $2.5 million. This marks the third consecutive year of the USA Fellows program, which provides direct support for artists by annually awarding fifty unrestricted grants of $50,000 to artists of all disciplines from across the country. The USA Fellows for 2008 hail from 21 states and range in age from 31 to 82; they were chosen by panels of experts in each field in recognition of the caliber and impact of their work. The artists will be honored tonight, November 10, in a celebration at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago.

Read the entire release here: http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/documentFiles/25.pdf

Visit A. Van Jordan's USA Fellow's page here:
http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/Public2/USAFellows/2008Fellows/Alphabetically/AVanJordan/index.cfm

Natasha Trethewey Featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

ELECTION 2008: The Challenge of Change

Race
A personal essay by Natasha Trethewey
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, November 09, 2008

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, an Emory University professor, considers the election of America’s first biracial president in terms of her own mixed background. Her poem below imagines her pregnant mother in the Deep South contemplating her unborn child’s uncertain future.

A few years ago, when I was working on the poem, “My Mother Dreams Another Country,” I was compelled to consider what my mother must have been thinking —- in 1966 —- about the biracial child she and my father were bringing into the world. The year before, my parents had broken two laws of the state of Mississippi by traveling to Ohio to marry and then returning to my mother’s home state. It was just after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but still before the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. State of Virginia in which state anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional. And it was years before those unconstitutional state laws were no longer enforced —- by custom, by intimidation, and by other deterrents imposed upon couples seeking marriage licenses. Barack Obama was just 5 years old when my mother was contemplating another country —- another America —- in which interracial marriage would be legal in the entire country. In 1961, when Obama was born, 21 states still had laws forbidding the marriage of his parents —- of blacks to whites.

Read the entire essay here:
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2008/11/09/trethewey.html

Listen to Natasha read the essay here:
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2008/11/09/trethewey.html#

Bianca Diaz Awarded 2008 Robert Watson Poetry Award

Bianca Diaz of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has been awarded the 2008 Robert Watson Poetry Award for her chapbook, No One Says Kin Anymore. The final judge was Dan Albergotti. Check back soon for more information and a list of finalists.

Bianca Diaz was born and raised in Miami, FL where she earned a BA in English from Florida International University. She then earned an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. She married the poet and chef Josh Stefanko and they moved to Milwaukee, WI. She currently teaches English and is the English Department Chairperson at St. Joan Antida High School. Her poems have been published in literary magazines all over the U.S.

"Brewing In Eden" by Elizabeth Volpe Now Available

Brewing in Eden by Elizabeth Volpe is the winner of the 2007 Robert Watson Poetry Award. $20 with shipping.

About the author. A 2001 and 2004 Pushcart Prize nominee, Elizabeth Volpe lives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including: Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Diner, Crab Creek Review, Comstock Review, The MacGuffin, Atlanta Review, Louisville Review, Porcupine, Siren, Ward6, Thema, and Lumina. She received first prize in the Briar Cliff Review 2004 Poetry Contest and the 2006 Metro Detroit Writers Contest. She won the 2008 Juniper Prize from Alligator Juniper and has also been nominated for 2008 Best New Poets. New work is forthcoming in Connecticut Review, Tar Wolf, Epicenter, roger, Cave Wall, Crab Orchard Review, and River Styx.

About the book. Handbound and letterpress-printed at Birch Book Press. Wood engravings by Frank C. Eckmair.

Purchase online here: http://www.springgardenpress.com/spg/books.html