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...

Last night's poetry group: Two poems with the word "whorls." Two poems with a science fictional feel. News of a fine review by Brad Leithauser in which he chooses Sarah Lindsay and Greg Williamson as two of our finest contemporary poets flying under the radar. "With her first book, Primate Behavior (1997), Lindsay might well have declared—were she not a poet who tempers her statements—that her subject was the world. Primate Behavior showed her continually sallying off to the planet’s outermost reaches: there were poems about arctic expeditions and jungles and crushing marine depths. She was likewise venturesome across history: there were poems about Constantinople and prehistoric cave-painters and various animals that vanished long before we humans could contribute to their extinction. From the outset of her career, Lindsay has employed a flexible free verse, and since her poems have often embraced evolutionary subjects (both Charles Darwin and...