Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

The deadline date has been extended to April 1 (postmark) for the inaugural Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka Prize in Poetry at the North Carolina A&T State University Creative Writing Program. Packets must be received in-house no later than April 4. On the anniversary of the A&T Four Greensboro Sit-in Movement and the onset of Black History Month, we celebrate the courageous legacy of African-American literary achievement by honoring the legacies of two literary giants. Their literary works and personal life energies have been spent in service to the uplifting of black people worldwide and to the struggle for freedom, justice and equality for all oppressed peoples. Their scholarship, activism, and poetry have reminded the world about the sacredness of human dignity and the need to preserve it. We are looking for poetry that seeks to honor the spirit of this tradition. The competition is open to writers without regard to geographical region or previous publication background. Win...

Cris Mazza stopped by North Carolina A&T today, a guest of the Creative Writing undergraduate program, to read from her latest novel, Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls . She's an intense woman with short-cropped hair who reads with a controlled passion - just right for the subject matter, young women exploited by men, sometimes because they lack power, and sometimes because their own psychological problems make it possible. She answered probing questions from faculty about language and intent, and the direct questions of students who wanted to know if she had "actually experienced" any of the story. "I was going to put on the cover that one-third of this book is true," she said, and then revealed the paths by which life experience is transmuted into fiction. Writers are generous folk, and never more so than when they help young writers struggling with their first projects. Thanks, Cris! We were happy to have you spend time with us in the Tarheel State.

I'm excited to be hosting Cris Mazza tomorrow at North Carolina A and T State University. She's on a book tour for Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls , stopping most recently at Davidson College, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Chapel Hill. We've never met except by way of social media, that potent new force that can bring down dictators, unite a nation, and on a smaller scale, bring together authors and readers who otherwise would never have met. The writing world gets larger and larger, and the number of books swells every year, but the power of networks and searches lets us find similar souls across continents and oceans and centuries. It's been fun to work with Cris, who like me has a history of successful angling for large and toothy fish! And it will be fun to see where connections take me this year as I launch my new novel.