Announcing the Next Lineup for the First Person Plural Reading Series (Virtual) on Sunday, September 12, 2021!

Join us via Zoom on Sunday, September 12, 2021 from 6-8pm for the next reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Allen Gee, Robert Jones, Jr., Kevin McIlvoy, Peter Markus and Vanessa K. Valdés, hosted and curated by Stacy Parker Le Melle. Each writer is extraordinary and I am thrilled that they will join us for this reading. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. RSVP here.

More about the writers:

Gee3Allen Gee is the author of the essay collection, My Chinese America.  He recently completed a novel, The Laborers, and is currently at work on At Little Monticello: the James Alan McPherson biography, (UGA Press).  He’s been the Editor at Gulf Coast, Fiction Editor at Arts & Letters, and Editor of the multicultural imprint 2040 Books.  His essay Old School won a Pushcart, and his work appears in numerous journals, as well as the anthology, Dear America.  He is currently the D.L. Jordan Distinguished Chair of Creative Writing at Columbus State University where he also serves as the Director/Editor of CSU Press.

Robert Jones Jr._credit Alberto Vargas RainRiver Images _croppedNew York Times-bestselling author Robert Jones, Jr., was born and raised in New York City. He received his BFA in creative writing with honors and MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College. He has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Paris Review, Essence, OkayAfrica, The Feminist Wire, and The Grio. He is the creator of the social-justice social media community Son of Baldwin. The Prophets is his debut novel. Photo Credit: Alberto Vargas RainRiver Images.

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Peter Markus is the author of several books of fiction, among them the novel Bob, or Man on Boat, and the collections of shorter fiction The Fish and the Not Fish, We Make Mud, and Good, Brother. He is also the author of Inside My Pencil, a work of non-fiction about the work he’s been doing for over two decades as a writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit. A new book of poems, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, is forthcoming in September of 2021. 

Head Shot McIlvoy - (Hi-Res)-4Kevin McIlvoy’s novel One Kind Favor (WTAW Press, May 2021) is his eighth published book. He has published five novels, A Waltz (Lynx House Press), The Fifth Station (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; paperback, Collier/Macmillan), Little Peg (Atheneum/Macmillan; paperback, Harper Perennial), Hyssop (TriQuarterly Books; paperback, Avon), At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press); and a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf Press). His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. His short-short stories and prose poems have appeared in The Scoundrel, The Collagist, Pif, Kenyon Review Online, The Cortland Review, Prime Number, r.k.v.r.y, Waxwing, and various online literary magazines. A collection of his prose poems and short-short stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C, has been published by Four Way Books (October 2017). For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor in chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1987 to 2019; he taught as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008. He has lived in Asheville, North Carolina since 2008.

Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is the director of the Black Studies Program at The City CollegeScreen Shot 2019-10-09 at 10.51.18 PM of New York-CUNY. A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, and a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, her research interests focus on the cultural production of Black peoples throughout the Americas: the United States and Latin America, including Brazil, and the Caribbean. She is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She is the author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). Her latest book, Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020) is an edited collection that re-centers Haiti in the disciplines of Caribbean, and more broadly, Latin American Studies.   

FPP Interview: Ashaki Jackson

Ashaki CandidIn her FPP Interview, Ashaki Jackson shares that despite writing on being surveilled and targeted as a Black person in the United States, and how grief for Black Americans feels either “iterative” or “unending,” her parents were still able to create a profound sense of protection for her, and what that meant. Jackson also shares what brought her peace during the pandemic quarantine, and much more.  Read her interview then RSVP to join us virtually on Sunday, April 18, 2021 from 6-8pm to hear Ashaki Jackson read with Ed Baptist, I.S. Jones, Kristin Palm, and Alison Stine.

We met the poems of Surveillance in 2016, and just as police officers have not stopped killing Black people with enduring impunity, your poems have remained as relevant to the moment as anything on tonight’s evening news. How have you been coping with this – our – reality? Do you feel anything has changed since when you first wrote these poems?

I cannot tell if grief is iterative or unending, you know? How does one cope with war? And when I say “war,” I mean that an armed group has been fighting against our existence in this nation for generations. It feels old, and so do I. It ages you. Despite knowing that killing Black Americans is a beloved and protected pastime in this nation, it’s such a worn and evil act antithetical to the All Lives Matter creed. I wrote Surveillance knowing that my work was not new rather it was in the tradition of a police brutality cannon. I wrote fully knowing that at any given time three living generations of Black people and Brown people were stuck in this dark loop of witnessing these deaths and knowing the outcome—grandparents, parents, children all spinning in an intimate, collective memory of violence.

In a 2014 interview, poet Khadijah Queen asked you about coping with distractions to your work and you shared how you found being “swallowed by the mundane” comforting. Examples you gave included “inundating [yourself] with a Big Bang Theory-spring cleaning-pedicure session or reading books in a loud restaurant.” The reading answer made my heart ache for pre-pandemic days, and the relative ease and safety of taking off to sit and read in a crowd, and how that can boost one’s mood and spark creativity.  How have you been coping with the pain and restrictions of the past year?

I’ve found some peace during the pandemic. My full-time position is high stress, and I was relieved to get space from the physical office. I commend the families who sheltered in place and the household leads who managed their personal fears along with those of everyone else in the house. My goodness, what is it like to keep everyone in a household alive and vigilant?! I sat still during the pandemic’s first two seasons. There was such an odd push for normalcy that didn’t feel fair. I shed activities that added more work to my day or didn’t bring me joy. I bought friends’ books to read. I practiced making pralines. I let my hair do what it wanted and took care of my skin since I had the time. I bought a plant that seems to enjoy life and really comfortable pajama sets in which I’ve never invested before. And sometimes I joined friends online. I put meaningful effort into surviving happily.

You have written powerfully about what it’s like to be surveilled not just as a Black person in our society, but as a Black person simply trying to live and be protected in one’s home.  Could you share what “home” means to you now, and how the meaning has possibly changed for you over time?

Home is where my parents reside. That is the first place I knew and understood protection. After the essay you reference was published, my parents shared other instances when we were not safe. They quietly assembled protections for us and refused to let me (as a child, as a teenager, and as a young adult) think I was anything other than protected. Any place that I have lived as an adult, I consider temporary because it is not with my greatest protectors. I’m grateful to all protectors.

You have been an active and committed community leader in the literary arts. What have you learned from this work?

One lesson of many is that publications, activities, and events produced by the literary community come from care. Yes, there are practical and financial reasons for these products, but they are also ways of giving gifts to each other that are long-lasting and memorable. Even curation is an act of care for writers and their audiences.

It’s April 2021.  What gives you hope? What gives you pause?

It took a pandemic to disabuse us of the grind mindset. I am hopeful that we continue prioritizing rest and care for ourselves and others, checking in, protecting personal time. Yes, there are reasons for pause at every turn and life challenges to honor; but I now choose to engage at my pace, to read friends’ books and write for joy. I choose to lean into the wholeness of “no” for self preservation. I get to live a different (better) quality of life.

FPP Interview: I.S. Jones

EDIT-9992In this FPP Interview, I.S. Jones shares how cooking can be a “reprieve from a legacy of blood,” how creating a professional future as a writer who creates spaces and security for other writers is the “work of the heart” she knows would be fulfilling, and much more.  Read her interview then RSVP to join us virtually on Sunday, April 18, 2021 from 6-8pm to hear I.S. Jones read with Ed Baptist, Ashaki Jackson, Kristin Palm, and Alison Stine.

In your poem “Cain” you re-imagine the Biblical characters Cain and Abel as sisters in what, to this reader, is a deeply satisfying reinterpretation. Could you tell us a bit about what inspired you to re-imagine the story this way?

I’ve been writing these poems since 2016 and it still dazzles me how my work reaches people, especially because I was very close to throwing this manuscript [chuckles]. I was still living in Astoria in 2016 with my sister and it was a very tumultuous time. Tr**p was just elected president, I was in a program that was dishonest about funding. I was deeply angry and that’s where “Cain” comes from. I need a safe space to put down my rage, least it goes elsewhere less safe. I also just deeply unsafe as a Black woman in an America that had become very proud to show it was a white supremacist nation. In the center of all that, my relationship with my sister was very brutal and violent. And that’s when the poems were born.

In your poem “Kitchen Work,” the speaker’s hands are “alchemical,” doing what it takes so that “no one goes hungry in my house.” Yet the speaker also declares: “Each of us knows a recipe for poison. I know my sister is allergic to peanut oil.” In this poem, and in so many others, you write profoundly and viscerally about life and death and how our own hands can make the difference. Are there scenes, or lingering images from your own life that you know have driven you to work with these themes?

I love to cook; cooking is one of my unfettered joys in this life. One of my earliest memories in the kitchen is my mother teaching me how to clean whole chicken and fishes. How to crack open a chicken’s ribs, how to descale a fish, how to skin a chicken, how to take out a fish’s red throat. The poem “Kitchen Work” is in the voice of Abel and I find her to be such a fascinating character because everything she understands about touch is inexplicably tied to death, so what if I could complicate her narrative. I think it’s a difficult position to be in: she has to keep killing to earn her keep, to prove her life is of value. In that way, much like myself, the kitchen is her reprieve from a legacy of blood.

Tell us about what “home” means to you. How does “home” differ for you and your other family members? Are the differences reconcilable? Does that matter?

This is a question that comes up in my chapbook. Years ago, Nimrod Journal had a call for poems about “home” and it occurred to me that I didn’t understand what the word means. I missed the deadline, but the question lingered. I’ll be honest with you that I still don’t know what “home” means. Home is my friends, my chosen family. Home is where my books are. Home is Brooklyn for me. Home is where I feel safest.

Your efforts show yourself to be a strong literary arts community builder. What has surprised you about this work?  What has enriched your own work?

Thank you for saying this, it means so much. It’s really the work of the heart for me. Last week I was talking to a teacher about what I wanted to pursue in terms of job prospects once I graduate. I was very frank and said, “I don’t want to teach. At least not in the conventional way.” I know I want the work I do to bring literary arts to larger communities. I want to generate funding for parents so they can have childcare and will have space to pursue their art with financial backing and without stress. I want to create physical space for immigrants seeking asylum. I have, for some time now, have been dreaming of create a multi-cultural space for all women and non-binary femmes called “The Immigrants Daughters Club” where we can share our stories of what it means to be children of immigrants. What surprises me about this work is hearing, “Wow, I need this” or “Thank you for doing this.”

I’m one of the editors for 20.35 Africa and right now we’re launching a fundraiser to be able to pay our staff, contributors, and mentorship program, an idea I pitched to Ebenezer Agu, 20.35 Africa’s founder when I first came onboard. I think about African Letters and the urgency I feel to create what the generation before us did not have and were unable to pass down to us. If I can dream big, and I know I can, I want to make conditions better than they are and pass that legacy onto the generation of writers coming behind me so that they can do even more than I was able to. Does it enrich my own work? Yes, I would say so. As I said, this is work of the heart. This is what I could spend my life doing and I would be fulfilled.

Announcing the Next Lineup for the First Person Plural Reading Series (Virtual) on Sunday, April 18, 2021!

Join us virtually on Sunday, April 18, 2021 from 6-8pm for the next reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Ed Baptist, Ashaki Jackson, I.S. Jones, Kristin Palm, and Alison Stine, hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. Grateful in advance for the fantastic poetry and prose we will hear this night. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. Please RSVP here.

More about the readers:

headshot3Ed Baptist grew up in Durham, North Carolina. He went to DC to attend Georgetown University. One day he was playing pickup basketball in the gym, and John Thompson was watching, but somehow Ed never got an invite to walk-on to the basketball team. So after he received his undergraduate degree he moved on and got his Ph.D. in History at the University of Pennsylvania.  At Cornell, he is Professor in the Department of History.  Together with faculty colleagues from four other universities, Baptist leads Freedom on the Move http://freedomonthemove.org, a collaborative effort to build a crowdsourced database of all North American fugitive slave ads.  The author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, (2014) and Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War (2002), he also co-edited New Studies in the History of American Slavery with the late Stephanie Camp.

BA0A4045-EditDr. Ashaki M. Jackson, a Cave Canem and VONA alumna, is the author of two chapter-length collections — Surveillance (Writ Large Press, 2016) and Language Lesson (Miel, 2016). Currently an Executive Editor at The Offing, she served on the VIDA: Women in Literary Arts Board and mentored for both the PEN USA Emerging Voices program and WriteGirl. Jackson, along with Alyss Dixson and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, also co-founded Women Who Submit, a national community that supports women and nonbinary writers in submitting their literary works to top tier publications. Readers may find her poetry and essays in Obsidian, 7×7 LA, CURA, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Bettering American Poetry, among other publications. She earned her MFA (poetry) from Antioch University Los Angeles and her doctorate (social psychology) from Claremont Graduate University.

EDIT-9992I.S. Jones is a queer American Nigerian poet and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart Pulp, The Rumpus, The Offing, Shade Literary Arts, Blood Orange Review and elsewhere. Her work was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at UW–Madison as well as the Inaugural 2019­­–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship recipient. Her chapbook Spells Of My Name is forthcoming with Newfound in 2021.

KPalmHeadshot2018Kristin Palm is the author of a poetry collection, The Straits, and co-editor of Absent but Present: Voices from the Writer’s Block. Her poetry and essays have also appeared in the anthologies The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, Kindergarde: Avant-garde Stories, Plays, and Songs for Children and Bay Poetics. As a journalist, she has contributed to numerous publications including The New York Times, Metropolis and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has taught writing in schools and community venues in Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area. She lives in Detroit, where she is a freelance writer and editor, nonprofit communications director and co-facilitator of the weekly Writer’s Block poetry workshop at Macomb Correctional Facility.

Alison Stine headshot by Ellee AchtenAlison Stine works as a freelance journalist at The New York Times. Her first novel Road Out of Winter, was published in 2020 (MIRA Books/HarperCollins), and is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Ohio Violence (University of North Texas Press). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, and others. Recipient of grants from the NEA, the Ohio Arts Council, NYU Journalism, and National Geographic, she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her next novel Trashlands will be published by MIRA Books/HarperCollins in October 2021.

About the host:

13166004_10154229341507375_8181859589919330252_nStacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco), was the lead contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath (McSweeney’s), and chronicles stories for The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project. She is a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Nonfiction Literature. Her recent narrative nonfiction has been published in Callaloo, Apogee Journal, The Atlas Review, Cura, Kweli Journal, Nat. Brut, The Nervous Breakdown, The Offing, Phoebe, Silk Road and The Florida Review where the essay was a finalist for the 2014 Editors’ Prize for nonfiction. Originally from Detroit, Le Melle lives in Harlem where she curates the First Person Plural Reading Series. Follow her on Twitter at @stacylemelle.

FPP Interview: Keya Mitra

keya-orange5“Regardless of whether we are writers or not, we have the power to shape our own narratives,” says Keya Mitra in her new FPP Interview. Read further to learn about her current writing projects earning accolades, how hiking 400 miles of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain impacted her body as well as her work, how she eloped during the pandemic, and so much more. Join us Sunday, March 7, 2021, to hear Dr. Mitra read with Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Jennine Capó Crucet, Koritha Mitchell, and Rhonda Welsh. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. Please RSVP here.

You were just named a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction for your novel Human Enough.  Would you tell us about this manuscript and how you first knew you had to write it?

Human Enough is the story of Tasha Patel, an Indian-American immigrant in Portland, Oregon, and her father—with whom she shares a medical condition that causes werewolf-level excessive hair growth. When shaven, they look normal, even beautiful. But when the father back in India gets dementia and leaves the house ungroomed, his neighbors mistake him for an animal and stab him to death. Tasha stops shaving in her grief. Meanwhile, video of the killing goes viral, evoking a visceral sense of complicity in all who watch. It reaches Portland during the 2017 Muslim Ban protests and sets off a solidarity movement centered on now-furry Tasha. People march in full-body suits of fake fur—covering their identities and shedding the weight of their ethnicities. Romance, violence, and a 221-mile pilgrimage ensue.

Right after the 2016 election, I felt more fearful about being a second-generation immigrant than I had in decades. I had six weeks to process my reaction before a scheduled brain surgery that threatened to leave me brain damaged. During that month-and-a-half, I wrote a very rough draft of the novel. When I recovered, I revised the story for years, honing it as a dark, avant-garde comedy. Then after the murder of George Floyd, I deleted the title and 60% of the book and made something sharper, harder, and swifter.

You were also shortlisted for the Dzanc Diverse Voices Prize for your short story collection The Sacred Gifts of Cows and Cheetahs. Please tell us about that project. Is there a particular story from that collection that speaks differently to you from the others? Or speaks differently of you as a writer?

Each story is distinct in its own way, but all the stories share certain themes: trauma, loss, communion, and transcendence. Multiple stories in the collection use idiosyncratic or surprising premises to arrive at essential and universal human truths about suffering and redemption. But I’d say that “The Magnificent Purr” stands out because the premise is particularly far-fetched and comical. A couple attend a retreat in Austin, Texas called The Magnificent Purr. The (very expensive) retreat involves donning cat costumes and refraining from showering, crawling around on all fours, communicating in marriage therapy only through meows, and, ultimately, trying to achieve the elusive purr. Of all the stories, that one might be the most outrageous, and it’s certainly the funniest. Still, it contains some profound moments—the couple attend the retreat in the first place because the narrator’s wife is suffering from a terminal disease, and both are seeking relief and healing. The story was published in the Bellevue Literary Review. That journal features work about illness and healing, and having my work appear in their pages felt so meaningful because the story, while absurdist, is very much about reclaiming our spirits in the midst of pain.

Looking back over your years of writing, are there experiences, or places, that have been particularly impactful on you and your writing, experiences or places that at the time, you didn’t perhaps know were making an impact?

In 2018, I hiked 400 miles of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain—roughly 20 miles a day for three weeks. I started the pilgrimage alone but made friends with other hikers and, alongside them, suffered from blisters and foot infections—everything you’d expect from long-distance hiking. As my body broke down, I talked to myself—quite a bit. Using my iPhone voice notes, I composed a memoir and dictated a hundred pages for the next draft of Human Enough. But more than the pages, I was transformed by the communal suffering and joy, and the sense of communion that came out of that. My fellow pilgrims almost all experienced pain, mourning, and/or displacement before embarking on the hike. I’ll never forget the openness of the conversations I had during that time, and the sense of connection we all experienced in the midst of our struggles. That transcendence has informed a lot of my writing—my fiction and nonfiction—since.

As a longtime professor of creative writing, is there guidance you’ve offered others that feels particularly true right now?

Regardless of whether we are writers or not, we have the power to shape our own narratives. A story that seems disempowering can be reframed to one that uplifts—James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a wonderful example. In that short story, Baldwin writes exquisitely about generations of pain and prejudice, and yet he ends with the story with a moment of connection and hope without losing sight of the ongoing nature of struggle.

I also emphasize, in both my literature and creative writing classes, that we need a diversity of stories—multiple perspectives on the same world, on ourselves and the consequences of our actions and the possibilities we may not know how to see on our own.

I show Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of the Single Story” to nearly all of my classes. Now more than ever, her words about the capacity of language to both dehumanize and empower feel essential and true. Only through challenging our “single stories” of one another can we connect with greater humanity and empathy.

It is March 2021, the month we mark one year since the first cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed in this country. What about this past year has been most challenging for you?  What has given you hope?

It has been a difficult time to be immunocompromised on many levels. My husband and I had to postpone a wedding. We had to devise safe ways to join protests. We had health scares and real emergencies and wildfire smoke that made the outside air unbreathable. But more than anything, the year has underscored how much I have to be grateful for. In August, my husband and I eloped in the mountains during a backpacking trip in the Wallowas (Oregon). We wouldn’t have gotten married that way without the pandemic, and yet it was one of the most joyous and otherworldly experiences of my life. We’ve been newlyweds on lockdown, and all this upheaval has brought us closer.

I’ve also been amazed by the resilience, good will, and creativity of those around me, particularly in the teaching profession. It’s inspiring.

What does the future hold?

So many hopes.

FPP Interview: Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk

Brilliant Books TC 4.2018In this 2021 FPP interview with Dr. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Bohnhorst Blackhawk speaks of spending an hour in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, of how she reclaimed her maiden name, of writing advice she finds most true, and so much more.  Join us on Sunday, March 7, 2021 to hear Bohnhorst Blackhawk read with Jennine Capó Crucet, Koritha Mitchell, Keya Mitra, and Rhonda Welsh. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. Please RSVP here.

After decades of living and writing in Detroit, Michigan, you now live and write outside of New Haven, Connecticut.  How has your new region and home impacted your writing, if at all?

It’s been a huge change for me and I don’t deny that it’s taken some getting used to. I am quite comfortable here, but leaving Detroit meant leaving a source of so much passion – many dear friends, fellow poets, my work with InsideOut, being a Kresge fellow and part of the incredibly vibrant cultural life of the city, the Detroit River, living and birding on the flyway, and memories of my beloved Neil Frankenhauser, the artist whose ashes we scattered in Toledo’s Maumee River in November 2019.  It’s great to be close to family here, but I doubt I’ll ever have as passionate an attachment to a place as my connection to Detroit.

Before Covid, however, since being here gives easy access to New York City, I visited frequently. I also frequent Amherst MA from time to time, the site of Emily Dickinson’s family home and museum. I’ve made a number of ‘pilgrimages’ there to take part in programs, overnighting sometimes at the Amherst Inn, which is directly across the street from Her home. I wrote a recent poem, “In Her Chamber,” after spending an hour in Her bedroom, an experience one can purchase as a fundraiser for the museum. That poem is collected in my fifth full-length collection One Less River, which came out in 2019 from Mayapple Press. It’s the only New England poem in the collection; the first section is all poems about Detroit. I’ve been very lucky here to find some fine poetry friends, who have been lifelines, and I have a poem just out in Waking Up To The Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis, a terrific anthology that along with the friendships makes me happy to be a Connecticut poet as well.

Please tell us about your current book-in-progress called “American Mercy.” Is there a founding story, or image, that guides you?

I’ve actually put that title to the side. I had thought about it as having to do with probing the nature of love, or its absence, at both a personal and a social justice level, with an emphasis on what Desiree Cooper has labeled “Writing While White,” but my current energies have been pulled more directly into poems about Neil, whom I still grieve tremendously. I have his paintings here in CT with me, and he is still very present in my heart, so I have been working and reworking a chapbook about him. The title is Maumee, Maumee, after what he called his “sacred” river where he would go day after day to sit and paint en plein air.  Some poems from this collection were finalists for the Joy Harjo Prize from Cutthroat Magazine, and another received a Pushcart Prize nomination from Negative Capability, so I’m hopeful that the manuscript will find a publisher.

Many of us have long known you as Dr. Terry Blackhawk, but recently you’ve reclaimed your maiden name Bohnhorst. Would you share a bit as to why you’ve made this choice?

Well, here’s a fun fact: I didn’t marry into Blackhawk. In 1970, in Detroit, I married Evans Charley, a member of the Te-moak Band of Western Shoshone from Nevada. Our son Ned [Blackhawk], the Yale historian, is also an enrolled member. Ned Charley was an adorable six-year-old when his dad decided to change his name (and thus our family name) to something more reflective of his heritage. We divorced in 2005, but by then I had already established myself as a poet and nonprofit arts leader under the name Blackhawk. I got used to it, although when people wondered about its origin, I would sometimes say, “I’m the white lady with the Indian name.”  A few months ago, however, when a member of my Unitarian congregation here in Connecticut approached me to ask how I “identify” (meaning which tribe), I realized that it was time to ward off any more confusion.  I think the Bohnhorst Blackhawk combination is the best way to do that.

In 2016’s The Whisk and Whir of Wings we find a collection of some of your favorite bird poems written over the years. How do you experience the “whisk and whir” in your current living and writing?

I’d have to say the whisk & whir is mostly in memory now. That is, for the meantime at least, I guess I’m a rather lapsed birder. Not that Connecticut isn’t a fabulous place for birding. The shore of Long Island sound is especially wonderful.  I’ve joined the CT Audubon and have explored some of the nature preserves, but I don’t have the energy for it that I once had. I am also the owner of a sweet little mixed poodle rescue dog, Max, who came into our family a few years ago and has become mine full time. Thanks to him, I walk a couple of miles every day, but walking a dog and birding do not go hand in hand.

Is there creative work by others that is inspiring you of late?

Over the last year or so, I’ve spent a lot of time writing blurbs for others. I think I’m going to call a halt to it, but it’s been great to get to know new collections by Judith Kerman, Derek Pollard, Jude Marr, and Mary Minock. And I can’t resist sharing my blurb for Pete Markus’s new and very moving collection, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, coming out from Wayne State University Press in a couple of months. It’s great to bookend this FPP series with Mr. Pete – you’re lucky to have him! — and I know you’ll be as moved by the poems as I am. He wrote them as a record, to capture his daily process of grieving after his father died.  He shared the poems with me privately before the press accepted them, and they were a real solace as I grieved Neil’s death. Others have also found that kind of comfort from the collection.  So I don’t mind giving you a sneak peek at the blurb.  Here it is.  Walk the river with Peter Markus in his daily homage to his father. Take in the levees, the fish, the abandoned steel mill, the birds, the river air his father will no longer breathe—all rendered with steady wonder and “the clarity that death brings.” And take comfort. Rather than “let silence have its way with grief,” Markus gives us—in poems as translucent as the clearest river water—“no better way to say goodbye.”

After many years of teaching, and of leading and training other teachers and writers-in-the-classroom, you have given all kinds of instruction and advice for those wishing to develop their craft as poets and writers. Is there any advice that stands out to you now, that you think is most true?

I guess the main thing is for writers to get out of their own way, that is, to stay open to surprise and discovery and not get bogged down trying to make particular points. E. M. Forster’s “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” was a favorite classroom mantra of mine, and I often urged my students, when they would stare off into space as if searching for inspiration on the ceiling, by saying “Don’t think. Write!”  I believe that writing itself overcomes the fear of writing. It generates new connections and unexpected ways of saying things.  When a piece of writing feels safe or stale, I suspect that the writer is going over old ground and not, as Gertrude Stein would say, allowing “creation (to) take place between the pen and the paper, rather than beforehand in a thought.” I think that Peter Markus’s method of writing must follow or flow in this way, which might account for the purity and translucence of his work.

It is March 2021, the month we mark one year since the first cases of Covid-19 were known in this country. What about this past year has been most challenging for you?  What has given you hope?

Keeping track of time has been the most challenging for me. In the summer I got together out of doors quite regularly with poet friends, which was a pleasure, but since the weather changed I haven’t gone out much, except to walk. One day blends into the next and the “before times” feel like a different life altogether. I’ve been able to stay in frequent touch with friends, though, which helps tremendously. And I’ve luckily been in a safe “bubble” with my son, new daughter-in-law and new grandson, and I see my older grandchildren regularly enough to make life very sweet indeed.  The stupidity and venality of a huge section of the US electorate and their chosen “jefe” has, of course, filled me with dread, but the Biden administration’s resourcefulness and compassion do give me hope.

What does the future hold?

I kept a little apartment in Detroit, close to the Detroit River and the Eastern Market, so once the pandemic lifts I hope to be able to get back there at least a couple of times a year.  I just completed my vaccinations, but I’m not in a big hurry to fly. I guess I’m still in a holding pattern, like the rest of us!

 

Announcing the Next Lineup for the First Person Plural Reading Series (Virtual) on Sunday, March 7, 2021!

Join us virtually on Sunday, March 7, 2021 from 6-8pm for the next reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Jennine Capó Crucet, Koritha Mitchell, Keya Mitra, and Rhonda Welsh and hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. This reading promises to be an extraordinary night full of remarkable poetry, prose, and scholarship. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. Please RSVP here.

More about the readers:

Brilliant Books TC 4.2018

A 2019 inductee into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame, former high school creative writing teacher Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project in 1995 to bring the power of poetry and literary self-expression to youth in Detroit classrooms and communities. Blackhawk’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and online at Poetry Daily, The Collagist, Interim, ONE, Verse Daily and elsewhere. Awards for poetry include seven Pushcart nominations, the Foley Poetry Award, and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod International. She was twice named Michigan Creative Writing Teacher of the Year by the Michigan Youth Arts Festival and is a Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow. Her five full-length poetry collections include Escape Artist (BkMk Press, 2003), selected by Molly Peacock for the John Ciardi Prize, and The Light Between (Wayne State University Press, 2012). Her first book body & field (Michigan State University Press, 1999) was a finalist for the Larry Levis, Four Way Books Intro and New Issues Awards, among others. One Less River (Mayapple Press, 2019) was on two best-seller lists in October 2019 and was named a 2019 BEST INDIE POETRY title by Kirkus Reviews. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk holds a B.A. from Antioch College and a Ph.D. and an Honorary Doctorate from Oakland University.  In 1992-1993, she received a Teacher-Scholar sabbatical award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the life and work of Emily Dickinson and has published poems, essays, and encyclopedia entries on the poet.  Other areas of inspiration include bird watching, mythology, and visual art and artists. She is currently working on a collection of poems entitled Maumee, Maumee memorializing the life and work of her beloved partner, Toledo artist Neil Frankenhauser (1939-2019).

Screen Shot 2021-02-13 at 7.08.51 PMJennine Capó Crucet is the author of Make Your Home Among Strangers, winner of the International Latino Book Award and cited as a best book of the year by NBC Latino, the Guardian, and the Miami Herald; and of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the John Gardner Book Prize. A Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times and a recipient of an O. Henry Prize, she is currently an associate professor at the University of Nebraska. Her essay collection, My Time Among the Whites, was published by Picador in September 2019.

Mitchell, Standing, Smiling OutdoorsKoritha Mitchell is an award-winning author, cultural critic, and associate professor of English at Ohio State University. Her first book, Living with Lynching, won awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her second monograph, From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture, appeared in August 2020 and was named a Best Book of 2020 by Ms. Magazine. She is also editor of the Broadview Edition of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy, and her scholarly articles include “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie,” published by American Quarterly, and “Love in Action,” which appeared in Callaloo and draws parallels between lynching and violence against LGBTQ communities. Her commentary has appeared in outlets such as CNN, Good Morning America, The Huffington Post, NBC News, PBS Newshour, and NPR’s Morning Edition. On Twitter, she’s @ProfKori.

Keya1Keya Mitra is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at Pacific University, where she received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018. Her short story collection has been a finalist for the 2020 Dzanc Books’ Diverse Voices Prize, the Bakeless Prize, the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award, and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and a semifinalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her fiction was recognized under “Other Distinguished Stories” in Best American Short Stories 2018 and has appeared in the Bennington Review, The Kenyon Review, Arts and Letters, The Bellevue Literary Review, Moss, The Southwest Review, Slush Pile, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, Confrontation, Aster(ix) and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. Her nonfiction is forthcoming in Witness Magazine and was the runner-up for the 2021 Witness Magazine Literary Awards. She has completed two novels as well as a short-story collection and memoir. Dr. Mitra has received a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, worked as a fiction editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts for two years and is the co-editor-in-chief of the literary journal Silk Road Review: A Literary Crossroads. She graduated in 2010 with a doctorate and MFA from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, this after spending a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing.

rhondasmileRhonda Welsh’s approach to poetry is similar to the way musicians approach music. “My poetry is meant to be heard. I always think about the rhythm and the flow of the words. That is as important to me as the message,” she says.

The only poet asked to perform during the Detroit Institute of Arts Re-opening ceremonies, her two-week retrospective of African and African-American poetry was a “must-see” during the donor and the community opening festivities. She has been featured at numerous other metro Detroit venues including The Carr Center, the Detroit Opera House, the Scarab Club, Detroit Artists Market, 5E Gallery, the Wright Museum, Campus Martius, Wayne State University, the Ford Performing and Community Arts Center, College for Creative Studies, Southfield Public Library, Casino Windsor and Marygrove College. And, like many poets, she has performed in countless coffee houses and gallery spaces throughout the Detroit area; nationwide in venues from NYC to Rock Springs, Wyoming to LA and internationally as an author at the Windsor Book Fair and the Quebec Writers’ Federation Retreat.

A native Detroiter with a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Public Relations and Organizational Communication, in 2006 she self-produced her debut CD, I Saw Myself. In 2010, she released her debut poetry collection, Red Clay Legacy. This effort was met with glowing reviews including a particularly moving one from one of her poetic inspirations, Nikki Giovanni, “Rhonda Welsh offers us a poetic view of the strength and beauty of the people of Red Clay — true Earth — the beginning. Whether a love poem or a question of giving, this poet steps up to the plate, hitting a home run! We welcome this voice to the poetic discourse.”

Rhonda resides in metro Detroit and you can visit her at rhondwelsh.com.

About the host:

13166004_10154229341507375_8181859589919330252_nStacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco), was the lead contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath (McSweeney’s), and chronicles stories for The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project. She is a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Nonfiction Literature. Her recent narrative nonfiction has been published in Callaloo, Apogee Journal, The Atlas Review, Cura, Kweli Journal, Nat. Brut, The Nervous Breakdown, The Offing, Phoebe, Silk Road and The Florida Review where the essay was a finalist for the 2014 Editors’ Prize for nonfiction. Originally from Detroit, Le Melle lives in Harlem where she curates the First Person Plural Reading Series. Follow her on Twitter at @stacylemelle.

Thank You for This Wonderful Night!

Screen Shot 2021-01-17 at 8.19.01 PMThank you to everyone who came together on January 17, 2021 to read from their work and to remember Anthony Veasna So. Deeply grateful to Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Desiree C. Bailey, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Max S. Gordon, Sara Lippmann, Gloria Nixon-John, Alex Torres and Samantha So Lamb for this night to remember. Thank you to the San Francisco Chronicle and Lit Hub for their advance notices of this reading.