"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Posts tagged ‘Bennington MFA’

Monday Must Read! Dark Roots by Caroline Malone

Caroline Malone was born and lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee.  A graduate of The University of Tennessee with a B.A. in English and Classics, she earned the MFA in Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, The Dos Passos Review, Women’s Voices, Women Period, Heartwood, and others. The collection Dark Roots explores the meaning of family, heritage, and identity. Currently, she teaches writing and literature at South College in Knoxville, TN. She also plays Irish traditional music on the bouzouki, mandolin, guitar, concertina, and fiddle.

Purchase Dark Roots Here!

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Stark and haunting, these poems dig deep to the roots of identity and the self.”Julia Watts, author of Gifted and Talented

I know how things sink in;” drawing deeply from the ancient land, the collective soul that hums beneath her feet, and in her words, Caroline Malone does, indeed, know, and reveals to us that knowing, of fear and prayer and loss, of the paths we make to seek—and find—our own souls, even when they seem to flee from us, into the history of the secret city of Oak Ridge, to the rubble at the feet of the Parthenon, into the arms of the Civil War ghosts who linger at the shoulders of every Southerner. -Mary Carroll-Hackett, author of (Un)Hinged, Death for Beginners, A Little Blood, A Little Rain, and The Night I Heard Everything.

Monday Must Read! Starlight & Error by Remica Bingham-Risher

Remica Bingham-Risher, a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet, is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013). She is currently the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children.

Purchase this beautiful book here.

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Learn more about Remica here

Praise for Starlight & Error

There’s starlight and sunlight – and no error I could find – in this elegant book where the soul shines through every line. Only when we see how richly the poems matter to the poet can they come so close to us – entering with inescapable feeling and authenticity. We believe, and live, what each poem says, because the heart knows truthful detail. Central to our humanistic beliefs are the love of daughter, wife, stepmother, lover. Here, we learn this all over again, and how complex problems like memory become strengths. Only perfect craft can make it all happen, with experience leading the way. Remica Bingham-Risher has written a world-class book of poems. It’s the best of the best in American poetry. This is no imitation. This is the real thing.–Grace Cavalier

In Starlight & Error, Remica Bingham-Risher redefines the beat of the heart not only in the adult situations of romantic love but also in the adult decisions within the love of family. The scope of her vision helps us see into our own lives with a sharper focus. At a time in America when we need hope the most, this book offers us an open path; we no longer “wonder what other secrets/ we’ve been keeping/ on this side of the world.” Here- in her songs of forgetfulness and of memory, songs of the closed fist and the open palm, songs of regrets and of gratitude-we clearly see a world worth fighting for.–A. Van Jordan 

Monday Must Read! Hunger for Salt by Elaine Fletcher Chapman

Elaine Fletcher Chapman lives on the West side of the Chesapeake Bay. She holds an MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars, Bennington College where she has worked on the staff since 1999. She founded The Writer’s Studio where she teaches poetry and nonfiction, provides editing services and organizes poetry readings and writing retreats. Her poems have been published in The Tishman Review, The EcoTheo Review, The Cortland Review, Connotation, The Sun, Calyx, Poet Lore, 5AM, Salamander, and others. She was guest blogger on The Best American Poetry Blog. Green River Press published her letterpress chapbook, Double Solitude. She writes non-fiction as well as poetry.

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For further inquiry: visit Elaine’s website here. 

Purchase Hunger for Salt Here

Visit  St. Julian Press

Praise for Hunger For Salt

The poems of Elaine Fletcher Chapman are meditations waiting for our eyes to open. A few of these poems remind me of the beautiful seashells one finds on the beach after a storm. Chapman writes from the heart reminding us to discover the strength to love. There is loss as well as celebration in Hunger for Salt. Here are poems Thomas Merton would tuck somewhere inside his robes. Here is the Chapman rosary for our days to come.”~ E. Ethelbert Miller Editor, Poet Lore Magazine

In Elaine Fletcher Chapman’s Hunger for Salt, the hunger is palpable: for the natural world, the spiritual world, and the realm of the carnal. These powerful, well-crafted poems invite the reader into the place where these worlds meet. There is an intimacy here missing from much contemporary poetry, and intimacy is what drew me in until my hunger, like salt, dissolved.”~ Wyn Cooper

Hunger for Salt is a tender evocation of the natural world. Chapman displays a poet’s sensibility, a quiet attentiveness to personal wonder, intimacy and grief. The stillness of these poems exposes the refractive quality of memory and desire; it is a poignant and elegant debut.”~ J. Mae Barizo

Daily Prompt Love <3 What We Inherit

10 October 2017

Make art inspired by this quote: 

When born you inherit what’s burning.~Liam Rector 

liam

Monday Must Read! Naomi Ayala: Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations

naomi-ayalaThe beautiful Naomi Ayala was born in Puerto Rico and moved to the United States in her teens, eventually earning an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Writing in both Spanish and English, she is author of the poetry collections Wild Animals on the Moon, chosen by the New York City Public Library as a 1999 Book for the Teen Age, This Side of Early, and this week’s recommended read, Calling Home:Praise Songs and Incantations. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Boriquén to Diasporican: Puerto Rican Poetry from Aboriginal Times to the New Millennium (2007), Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature (2006), and First Flight: 24 Latino Poets (2006).

An educator and arts administrator interested in environmental causes, Ayala has received numerous awards, including the Connecticut Latinas in Leadership Award, the 2000 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy of Environmental Justice Award, and the 2001 Larry Neal Writers Award for Poetry from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Ayala has been a visiting humanities scholar for Hermana a Hermana/Sister to Sister and was co-chair of the board of directors for the organization Change: Building Social Justice, Starting in the Classroom; she co-founded the New Haven Alliance for Arts and Cultures. A former resident of Washington, DC, she currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and works as a freelance writer, educational consultant, and teaching artist.

 

Buy Naomi’s beautiful books!

Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations

http://bilingualpress.clas.asu.edu/book/calling-home

This Side of Early

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/side-early

Wild Animals on the Moon

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/wild-animals-moon-and-other-poems

 

Read More from Naomi Online

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53007

http://washingtonart.com/beltway/ayala.html

http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/nayala.html

http://washingtonart.com/beltway/ayala4.html

http://www.nathanielturner.com/naomiayalabio.htm

http://www.anomalouspress.org/current/25.ayala.winter.php

http://blogthisrock.blogspot.com/2010/11/poem-of-week-naomi-ayala.html

 

Interviews

http://www.eethelbertmiller.com/muse/ayala.html

http://letraslatinasblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/pablo-miguel-martinez-interviews-naomi.html

Interview for the Oral History Program at the Institute for Latino Studies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPdLwaN2ez8

 

Hear Naomi Read!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isocCGT-hFQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJZKJpqAIAw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUPkGvwHjFo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py5zfe-f9kc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84jhZutUlWo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABMXD7mY3uc

 

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

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