Savannah Sipho's voice opens a recent episode of the Decolonization in Action podcast. Sipho is reading (in German) Maya Ayim's poem "Blues in Black and White" (“blues in Schwarzweiß”). The reading took place during a recent critical walking tour ("Dekoloniales Flanieren") organized to mobilize demands to change a racist street name in the Berlin's Mitte district. While the opening poem is in German, the ensuing interview with Sipho is in English. The interview covers a lot of ground, but here's a few things Sipho touches on: bringing her private writings into public spaces, her experience being Afrodeutsche in Berlin, and why she felt it was important to share the poem "Blues in Black and White" during the anticolonial walking tour event.
Award-winning writer Jaylan Salah is a poet, translator, content expert, and film critic.Workstation Bluesis a collection from the cubicle for white-collar workers worldwide passing the time between meetings and computer screens. The poems blur: monsters are replaced by monitors, flame-throwers by LED lights, and swords by client comments. Cristina Deptula, executive editor of Synchronized Chaos Magazine,http://synchchaos.comcommented: “With energy and spunk, Jaylan Salah celebrates imagination, beauty, and most of all, freedom through her poetry and prose.”
Smallwood: What is your educational, literary background and when did you begin to write prose and poetry?
Our final "So You Wanna Win A Book Prize" interview of the season is with poet 'Gbenga Adeoba, the 2019 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets Winner. This is the last of a series of illuminating conversations between PS Book Prize Coordinator Jamaica Baldwin and writers who have played the book prize game and won! There are only 2 days left to submit to the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Click here for full details. Read on for Baldwin's conversation with 'Gbenga Adeoba. Click here to buy Adeoba's Prize-winning collection Exodus.
My mom describes horrible things as “dreadful.” One of my friends calls excellent things “dynamite.” Neither of these feels quite right in my mouth, but I’m still charmed when they say them. Many of my favorite people to talk to have their own go-to vocabularies, their own distinctive ways of talking. (Of course, it’s entirely possible that everyone does, and I just don’t talk to everyone, so I wouldn’t know.) But it’s true on the page, too. Good writing, as the saying goes, just hits different. Some poems simply sound like “oh, of course she wrote this.” And when some characters open their mouths, I wouldn’t mind if the dialogue went on for pages and pages.
Submitted by astrosnider on Tue, 03/03/2020 - 18:39
but you can still get some great deals at bookfair prices
Prairie Schooner and the APBF will have a significantly reduced presence at this year’s AWP Conference in San Antonio, as most of our staff will not be traveling.
For the next several weeks, visit the blog for illuminating conversations between PS Book Prize Coordinator Jamaica Baldwin and writers who have played the book prize game and won! We're currently seeking submissions for the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Click here for full details. Read on for Baldwin's conversation with Tjawangwa Dema. Click here to buy Dema's Sillerman Prize-winning collection The Careless Seamstress.
Last week, one of our new interns was reading submissions, and he stopped and said, “I just read two poetry submissions in a row with the phrase ‘a jealous moon.’ What are the odds?” Unfortunately, the odds are not so long.
A few years back, our Editor in Chief, Kwame Dawes, shared a tweet a day in a series he called “Memos to Poets,” and he called out a few words he was seeing too often.
#13: This just in: “Gloaming” has been banned from poetry, especially Irish themed poems
Submitted by astrosnider on Wed, 02/26/2020 - 12:24
An Interview with Venita Blackburn
by Jamaica Baldwin
For the next several weeks, visit the blog for illuminating conversations between PS Book Prize Coordinator Jamaica Baldwin and writers who have played the book prize game and won! We're currently seeking submissions for the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Click here for full details. Read on for Baldwin's conversation with Venita Blackburn, who won the PS Book Prize for her story collection Black Jesus and Other Superheroes.
Good writing strives toward many things—often it’s momentum, stakes, and surprise. Ideally, when you’re writing carefully (or at the very least, when you’re revising!), you’re aware of the language of your work, instead of only the content of the idea or the narrative thrust, and you’re making careful, interesting, and economical selections to keep a poem or a story moving, and to keep a reader moving along with it. You brilliant writer, you, of course you choose your words wisely.
August is Women in Translation month and we wanted to celebrate by sharing a selection of brilliant authors from all over the world whose work we've published. Enjoy!
When asked about poetry, Ted Kooser, former Poet Laureate of the United States, responds, “One important objective for me is to write clearly and accessibly.”
