"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 ‘women writers’

Quarantine Prompt a Day <3 Elders

26 March 2020 

My grandmothers. Two women from completely different worlds, cultures, backgrounds, across a vast socioeconomic divide, brought together at the end of their lives, because my parents loved each other, and loved them.

From Miz Pearl I learned about survival, food preservation, foraging, mending, how to find and create beauty even on the darkest days, and the power of prayer, especially when it’s sung. From Miz Ann I learned about the joy to be found in making things with your hands, the value of being a smartass, the pervasive connection of laughter, which fork to use 🙂 and how even the brashest and most self-regarding among us can learn the power of gratitude and humility. 

Fierce women, strong women, wise women, loving women, despite the brokenness life dealt both of them. When they lived together, sharing the same room in my parents’ house, in the twilight of their lives, they became unlikely friends and sisters. ‘Cause that’s what Love does.

Make art about what you’ve learned from elders, about the gifts they bring to our lives. 

Category:

2020 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Family, fiction, Food, freedom, Gratitude, healing, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, peace, poetry, prompts, self care, Writing, Writing Prompts

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Monday Must Read! Corn Exchange by Helen Vitoria

Helen Vitoria is an award winning poet and an artist living in Pennsylvania.  Her poems and photographs appear widely online and in print.  She is the author of nine poetry chapbooks, a poetry pamphlet, a full length poetry collection and a collaborative ekphrastic poetry/photography collection. Her poems have been nominated thrice for Best New Poets & several Pushcart Prizes.

Corn Exchange (Wild Chestnut Press. 2013), her first full length collection of poetry won the 2014 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) SILVER MEDAL for Poetry, the 2014 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Poetry, an Honorable Mention for the 2014 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Book Award, in addition to having placed as a finalist for the 2014 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award & the 2014 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal, and recently been nominated for the 2015 Tufts Discovery Award.

Buy this beautiful book here! 

corn exchange

Cover photo : The Cornfield by Kathy Harcom , http://www.kathyharcom.com

Visit Helen’s website here! 

Praise for Corn Exchange

“Invoking Anne Sexton’s brand of highly personal, confessional verse, Vitoria’s tragically intimate collection fearlessly attempts to reconcile ideas such as fear, suicide, family, commitment, pornography, memory, and experience through the binary elements of sight and touch. Vitoria shows a clear understanding of the safety existing in the eyes, in the act of seeing and observing, and in its inherent physical distance that the hands cannot and do not carry. Not until there exists a trust able to reconcile that physical distance and, as Vitoria explains, “spread the body, [using] thumb and palm and say: here, be happy.”– Hoffer Award judges had to say to the US Review of Books 

Corn Exchange has been taught in MFA courses in Umbria, Italy, and her poem, We Were Horses, taught in various Creative Writing MFA classes throughout the US.

She is the Founding Editor & Editor in Chief of  the award winning, Thrush Poetry Journal  & Thrush Press.  She also  served as a Poetry Editor for Poets & Artists Magazine.  She teaches a free monthly poetry  workshop in her community and will be teaching poetry to inmates in Pennsylvania Corrections  Facilities.  She is working on her second full length collection of poetry, NEBRASKA. Visit her listing on Poets & Writers here. 

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Gratitude, healing, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Readings, Writing

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Reading Series for Virginia Womxn Writers! Call for Submissions!

Womxn at Red Door 104: Words & Art

A New Reading Series Celebrating Virginia Womxn, Womxn-Identifying, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, & Nonbinary-Identifying Writers

red door logo

Womxn at Red Door 104: Words and Art, created to celebrate Virginia womxn writers, is a partnership between Creative Writing at Longwood University and Red Door 104, a unique gallery and art learning center owned and operated by the tireless and talented Audrey Sullivan,  in historic downtown Farmville,Virginia.

The series will consist of two events annually:

  • A reading and reception in April 2020, with two featured readers and five cameo readers.
  • All selected readers will then also have the unique and exciting experience of having visual art created by central Virginia artists in response to their submitted work. This art will be revealed in a second event, an art opening at Red Door 104 the following October.

The first Womxn at Red Door 104 reading will take place from 2-4 pm on Saturday, April 4, 2020. The art opening will take place in October 2020, date tba.

Selected writers must be available to read in person, and should be willing to attend both events.

Believing that artists should be compensated when possible, we will award all selected readers a small token honorarium.

Please submit writing samples, as detailed below, along with a 50-75 word bio, via Submittable. Please include in your bio your current Virginia city of residence.

Submissions are limited to current Virginia residents.

Send us your best! We’re looking for work that is visually rich, and that will make for a compelling live reading.

Full Submission Details Here! 

 

Category:

2019 Prompts, activism, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Call for Submissions, Creativity, Editing, fiction, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, healing, Love, nonfiction, One Love, peace, poetry, Readings, Womxn at Red Door 104, Writers Reading, Writing, writing opportunities

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Monday Must Read! Raised by Humans by Deborah Miranda

An enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, poet Deborah Miranda was born in Los Angeles to an Esselen/Chumash father and a mother of French ancestry. She grew up in Washington State, earning a BS in teaching moderate special-needs children from Wheelock College in 1983 and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Washington. Miranda’s collections of poetry include Raised by Humans (2015); Indian Cartography: Poems (1999), winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas; and The Zen of La Llorona (2005), nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Miranda also received the 2000 Writer of the Year Award for Poetry from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Her mixed-genre collection Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) won a Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher’s Association and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Award. She teaches at Washington & Lee.

Buy this beautiful book here!

miranda humans

“The poems in Raised by Humans are about surviving childhood and colonization. Childhood did not agree with Deborah Miran­da, mostly because the adult humans in charge of her life were not prepared to manage their own lives, let alone the life of a human-in-training. Humans raised Deborah, but it wasn’t a hu­mane childhood.

This poetry collection is also about how indigenous people survive civilization and become readers and writers of the same alphabet that colonized their culture. The complexity of being forced to find her way into relationship with the very people or cultures that have hurt/raised Miranda is a paradox at the heart of her poetry, which pushes language past what Miranda calls the “alphabet of walls.”

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Editing, Gratitude, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Writers Reading, Writing

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Monday Must Read! Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith

In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television.

Buy this amazing book here! 

blood dazzler 1

Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar:

The cowboy grins through the terrible din,
***
And in the Ninth, a choking woman wails
Look like this country done left us for dead.

An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing.

Patricia Smith is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. A record-setting, national poetry slam champion, she was featured in the film Slamnation, on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and is a frequent contributor to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. Visit her website at http://www.wordwoman.ws.

Category:

activism, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Editing, Gratitude, healing, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, resistance, Writing

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Special Sunday Call for Submissions <3 Reading Series for Virginia Womxn Writers!

Womxn at Red Door 104: Words & Art

A New Reading Series Celebrating Virginia Womxn, Womxn-Identifying, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, & Nonbinary-Identifying Writers

red door logo

Womxn at Red Door 104: Words and Art, created to celebrate Virginia womxn writers, is a partnership between Creative Writing at Longwood University and Red Door 104, a unique gallery and art learning center owned and operated by the tireless and talented Audrey Sullivan,  in historic downtown Farmville,Virginia.

The series will consist of two events annually:

  • A reading and reception in April 2020, with two featured readers and five cameo readers.
  • All selected readers will then also have the unique and exciting experience of having visual art created by central Virginia artists in response to their submitted work. This art will be revealed in a second event, an art opening at Red Door 104 the following October.

The first Womxn at Red Door 104 reading will take place from 2-4 pm on Saturday, April 4, 2020. The art opening will take place in October 2020, date tba.

Selected writers must be available to read in person, and should be willing to attend both events.

Believing that artists should be compensated when possible, we will award all selected readers a small token honorarium.

Please submit writing samples, as detailed below, along with a 50-75 word bio, via Submittable. Please include in your bio your current Virginia city of residence.

Submissions are limited to current Virginia residents.

Full Details Here! 

 

Category:

2019 Prompts, activism, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Community Events, Creativity, fiction, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, healing, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, prompts, Readings, resistance, Writers Reading, Writing, writing opportunities, Writing Prompts

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Daily Prompt Love <3 So Much Power

23 August 2019 

Make art about the power of story, of how story can change lives. 

story

Category:

2019 Prompts, activism, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, healing, Love, nonfiction, One Love, peace, poetry, prompts, resistance, Writing, Writing Prompts

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Daily Prompt Love <3 Not Allowed

18 August 2019 

Make art about what’s forbidden. 

forbidden

Image by engin akyurt from Pixabay

Category:

2019 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, fiction, nonfiction, peace, poetry, prompts, resistance, Writing, Writing Prompts

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Call for Submissions! Virginia Womxn Writers! <3

Womxn at Red Door 104: Words & Art

A New Reading Series Celebrating Virginia Womxn, Womxn-Identifying, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, & Nonbinary-Identifying Writers

red door logo

Womxn at Red Door 104: Words and Art, created to celebrate Virginia womxn writers, is a partnership between Creative Writing at Longwood University and Red Door 104, a unique gallery and art learning center owned and operated by the tireless and talented Audrey Sullivan,  in historic downtown Farmville,Virginia.

The series will consist of two events annually:

  • A reading and reception in April 2020, with two featured readers and five cameo readers.
  • All selected readers will then also have the unique and exciting experience of having visual art created by central Virginia artists in response to their submitted work. This art will be revealed in a second event, an art opening at Red Door 104 the following October.

The first Womxn at Red Door 104 reading will take place from 2-4 pm on Saturday, April 4, 2020. The art opening will take place in October 2020, date tba.

Selected writers must be available to read in person, and should be willing to attend both events.

Believing that artists should be compensated when possible, we will award all selected readers a small token honorarium.

Please submit writing samples, as detailed below, along with a 50-75 word bio, via Submittable. Please include in your bio your current Virginia city of residence.

Submissions are limited to current Virginia residents.

Complete Details Here! 

Category:

2019 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, fiction, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, healing, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, prompts, Readings, resistance, Womxn at Red Door 104, Writers Reading, Writing, writing opportunities, Writing Prompts

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Call for Submissions! K’in! Seeking Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, & Young Writers!

Experimental, traditional, playful, prayerful, celebratory, challenging: human—try us. Show us a new way to tell one of the millions of stories under that glorious sun.

We’d love to read your work! Complete Submission Details Here! 

Together 2

Category:

activism, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Call for Submissions, Creativity, Editing, fiction, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, K'in, literary journals, litmags, Love, nonfiction, One Love, peace, poetry, publishing, Writing, writing opportunities

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