More Bits of Good News

76º ~ with a dew point under 70, all is passing fair outside for now, forecast calls for mid-90s for the next seven days, a stormy Sun/Mon on the outlook


Today started off with all kinds of over-stimulation on Facebook as posts about some recent good news exploded, but first, some good news not about me but about a poetry friend.

Amanda Auchter's new book The Wishing Tomb (Perugia Press) won the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry!  Now that is a mighty wahooooooooooooooo!  This book is on my to-read pile, so expect a blog response soon.

Last night, I found out that a panel on which I am a participant was accepted for AWP 2014 in Seattle. Wahooooooooo!  All thanks to John Bell for bringing together "Here We Gather: History and Advice on Setting Up a Writers Conference, Festival, or Colloquium at a Two-Year College." I'm looking forward to sharing information about the Big Rock Reading Series at PTC and to learning how to make it even better from my fellow panel members!  (Hat Tip to Tawnysha Greene who tagged me on FB to tell me that she saw my name in the program before I even read the email from John!)

Earlier in the week, poet and blogger Diane Lockward emailed me to give me a heads up about a poem of mine appearing on Verse Daily today.  All thanks, Diane!  Apparently, Verse Daily sends out an email on Monday with the list for the upcoming week.  I'm now signed up for that email!  In any case, stop by Verse Daily today and check out "Small-Time Rapture," a sickly speaker poem that appeared in the lovely & magnificent Barn Owl Review 6.

Finally, I'm thrilled to announce the creation of the Central Arkansas Broadside Project.  I followed through with my intent and have enlisted a handful of local poets and writers to contribute.  Each will send me a poem that I will format into a broadside.  Along with the poems, I will publish the writers' traditional bios, but I will also publish a list of recommended poets on each broadside.  I imagine someone stopping for a couple of minutes at a coffee shop, gallery, library/bookstore, even a hair salon, and reading a poem.  Perhaps, the reader may like the poem, and perhaps, like many non-poets out there, the reader will want to read more poetry but not know where to start.  The author's bio is one place to start, but the list of recommendations just sweetens the pot. The timeline looks like the first broadside will go up in October, and I've got a fine baseball-reference poem from Hope Coulter as the lead-off batter.  Soon, I'll have a web presence for the project and will keep you all posted.