Natasha Trethewey to Read for the Cropper Writers' Series

Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Comes to USD

Take a journey through the depths of the deep South this Friday with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, whose body work has been described as “muscular, luminous poems (that) explore the complex memory of the American South.”

She’ll take the stage at USD as the focus of the Cropper Writers’ Series; her most recent collection of poems, Native Guard, explores the story of one of the first black regiments to fight during the Civil War. The work is said to be “both a pilgrimage and an elegy,” in which Trethewey “skillfully employs a variety of poetic forms to create a lyrical monument to these forgotten voices.”

Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Native Guard, becoming on the fourth African American to win the esteemed award. The book includes passages that honor her mother and recalls her parent’s interracial marriage, which was still illegal in 1966 in Mississippi. The poet brings a tremendous strength to the Cropper Writers’ series through her work, which focuses on the public and personal aspects of ancestral remembrance.

Read the entire article here:
http://www.sandiego.edu/insideusd/?p=2331

Dan Albergotti at "First Book Interviews"

First Book Interviews
Continuing in the tradition of Kate Greenstreet

#19 - Dan Albergotti
Thursday, April 2, 2009

In a recent section in Poets & Writers, Debut Poets, you are one of the featured poets. I’m going to try and ask some questions dealing with some answers from that article. How often had you sent out The Boatloads before it was chosen as the winner of the A. Poulin Poetry Prize? It says you spent eight years writing the book. Was this the last eight years, or had you been writing the book before that without knowing it? I could also ask: Did any of The Boatloads come from your MFA thesis?

It was pretty much the last eight years, at least in terms of writing the actual poems that appear in The Boatloads. But from another perspective, you could say that I’d been “writing the book” for much, much longer. I’m sure I’ve been obsessively thinking about the ideas and themes of these poems for more than half my life. A lot of the poems in the book did appear in my MFA thesis, but that collection has, as you might expect, a much less unified vision.

Read the entire interview here:
http://firstbookinterviews.blogspot.com/2009/04/19-dan-albergotti.html

Camille Dungy at the Poetry Foundation

Camille Dungy

What’s the word for wonderful in your language?

Global capitalism is nothing new. Through history, the need to maintain the flow of capital has driven the diasporas of people, languages, and, yes, poetry. Whoever thinks contemporary North American poetry is provincial or isolationist hasn’t read the four poets I discuss in this post.

Read the entire post here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/04/1863/

Dan Albergotti Interviewed at "32 Poems"

Dan Albergotti Interview

by deborah ager
March 31, 2009

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. In 2008, his poem “What They’re Doing” was selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina.

1. Do you think poets have an easier time getting published with higher credentials? Why or Why not? Also of your “hats,” which do you find most difficult to wear and why?

Over the years, I’ve occasionally heard this suspicion that having a good cover letter can get you “in” at magazines and presses. I just don’t buy it. Only the work matters to editors. And if a lot of people being published have degrees in creative writing, isn’t there a rival hypothesis to the idea that the degree “got them in”? Doesn’t it make sense that someone who committed two-to-four years of his of her life to study writing at a post-graduate level might just have developed abilities to the point that he or she is writing poems worthy of being published?

I do wear a lot of hats, and it’s difficult in the sense that it stretches my economy of time very thin. But I’m lucky in that every hat I wear—as writer, teacher, editor—is wonderful, so it’s hard to apply the word “difficult” to any of it. I’m blessed, really.

Read the entire interview here:
http://blog.32poems.com/997/dan-albergotti-interview/