On the Road Again: Alabama Book Festival
For the second straight weekend, I’m off to a city I’ve never visited before for a literary event—this time around, it’s the Alabama Book Festival in Montgomery, where I’ll be taking part in a panel about the publishing industry and what current circumstances and looming developments hold in store for authors. (I’ll be joined by publicist Julie Schoerke, radio journalist Stephen Usery, and novelist Susan Gregg Gilmore, the last of whom I met last year at Virginia’s Festival of the Book.)
It’s shaping up to be a pretty fun day; my friends Kathy Patrick and Karen Spears Zacharias will also be on hand, as well as some authors I’ve been interested in for a while, including Elise Blackwell, Ace Atkins, and Daniel Wallace, and big-name writers like Pearl Cleage, Rick Bragg, and Robert Hicks. And that’s just for starters. If any of you reading this are in the neighborhood, come on down—did I mention it’s free?
15 April 2010 | events |
Quick Hits for National Poetry Month
⇒Any poets who have already filed their income tax returns and are thus at loose ends for the next 24 hours? You’ve still got time to enter the 2010 BOMB poetry contest—even more now that they’ve extended the deadline a day since I first got the email announcement! For a reading fee of $20, which includes a one-year subscription to the magazine, you can submit three to five poems for consideration; the ultimate winner, selected by Susan Howe, will receive $500 and be published in a future issue.
⇒Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of attending several iterations of the Academy of American Poet’s annual “Poetry and the Creative Mind” benefit; you can read my dispatches from the 2004 event and the 2005 event here, and then in 2007 and again in 2008 I was at GalleyCat, and then I couldn’t make it to last year’s show, but Mrs. Beatrice was there. We’ll both be unable to attend this year’s event, which is being held next Tuesday night (4/20) at Alice Tully Hall, but you should go if you can: this year’s celebrity readers include Bill Irwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gabriel Byrne, and Rosanne Cash, and if it’s anything like the shows I’ve been to, it’s going to be a wonderful evening.
14 April 2010 | poetry |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
