I came around to the idea of this book being a lot like the storytelling I would do in early romantic relationships, when I wanted so badly to share my whole whole world with this person who felt vitally important to me, who I couldn’t wait to have fully immersed in my life and the world I’d known.
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A Normal Interview with Jubi Arriola-Headley by Arielle K. Jones
Kink has a more expansive meaning. … Kink as just that, sexual kinkiness. Kink as, the kink in Black folks’ hair. Kink as, a kink in the system. Kink as in, broke. So, I play off all the different ways that kink is a thing that we think about.
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A Normal Interview with Leah Silvieus and Lee Herrick, by Bradley Samore
For me, the way that I’ve learned to access faith or my relationship with God is primarily through poetry. It is this dynamic, ongoing process, and I think that that’s the way that faith has to live in me.
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A Normal Interview with Melissa Febos by M.D. McIntyre
It feels important to acknowledge that I come to theory—and I include theory in my work—out of a place of unknowing, and I don’t privilege that language and work over a sort of simple, straightforward description of experience.
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A Normal Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib by Mialise Carney
I think I enjoy how many people can perceive the same performance in different ways, and how those ways might be directly linked to the way those people are perceived by the public when not performing anything beyond simply living.
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A Normal Interview with Monica Sok by Mariah Bosch
I write down dreams as they tell themselves to me. I write down as much as I can remember, trying to get the details and the order of events right––not interpreting them but documenting them. But I think there’s a little bit of freedom in figuring out how a dream takes shape on the page.
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A Normal Interview with Khaty Xiong by Jer Xiong
A lot of things have changed me as a poet since 2015, but what these changes have ultimately revealed is that I cannot live without poetry. I need it to commune with the living, to commune with the dead, and to meet the many burdens of grief that come with being alive.
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A Normal Interview with torrin a. greathouse, by Angel Gonzales
I often know — or think I know — that I have found the right language for relating an experience when the act of speaking a poem out loud makes me shake.
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Black. Wild. Laughing. Revisiting Danez Smith’s Homie and Reading at Fresno State by Angel Gonzales
Smith is writing from the margins, not about them, centering on all the things that are often denied, like love, tenderness, pain, friendship, and most importantly, joy. But there is no way around it, as Smith says when speaking about their process for self-care after writing about Black trauma.
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A Normal Interview with Chelsea Biondolillo by Brock Allen
Amassing research and playing with it and seeing what it might turn into is very much a practice I enjoy. I would do that even if I didn't write essays. The last year of not writing any essays is a testament to that.
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Torches Lighting the Way: An Interview with Juan Felipe Herrera By Michael Torres and Christopher Buckley
Fresno has opened for me like a Lotus flower. I say thank you to this city.
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Constellation of Memory: An Interview with C.G. Hanzlicek by Christopher Buckley
No emotion recollected in tranquility; it was all heat of the moment.
Read MoreRoundtable Discussion: “Lessening our Existential Despair,” a Conversation with Fiction Writers, Emily Wortman-Wunder and Jennifer Wortman by Emily Sinclair
I read these stories as, in part, witnessing our current political, environmental, and cultural exigencies and the way they push on our interior lives and our relationships. Of course, it’s easy to read everything that way these days, given the lightspeed of our news cycles and the dire tones of our news.
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“I saw an opportunity to approach this very serious history from a different angle” - Maceo Montoya
A Normal Interview with Maceo Montoya
I saw an opportunity to approach this very serious history from a different angle.
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Pos Moua published his first collection of poetry, the chapbook Where the Torches are Burning (Swan Scythe Press) in 2001. His second collection of poetry was recently released, a full length book entitled Karst Mountains Will Bloom (Blue Oak Press, 2019). His poetry explores the depths of love and grief, the natural and spiritual worlds, the body and the soul. Karst Mountains Will Bloom has been described as “a landmark achievement: ascendant, transcendent, visionary” by Fresno Poet Laureate Lee Herrick. Poet Mai Der Vang, author of Afterland and winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award, says that Pos Moua has given readers “radiant language and natural eloquence… the dark and light of his heartscape.” A poet of great grace and honesty, Pos Moua is a pioneer of Hmong American literature and a true visionary.
A Normal Interview with Pos Moua
To live in poetry is to be honest.
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A Normal Interview with Brian Turner
Poetry is a type of internal architecture, a form of world-building done verse by verse.
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Juan Felipe Herrera has said of Sara Borjas’ first book, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff, “This is a groundbreaker. Good-bye to fashionable old stuff, adios to the graspable that can never be touched. Come to the fearless. A brava-shaking collection.” It has been referred to as autobiographical, but it is more a consideration of the speaker’s identity, place, loss, love, and perseverance.
A Normal Interview With Sarah Borjas
When we are heartbroken, we aren’t at a loss. We are resourceful. We are still here.
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2019
Children’s Literature
Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 978-15344436794
A Normal School Interview with Joe McGee and Jess Rinker
There is so much more to living life as an author, to being a professional writer. Anyone can sit down and write something. A professional offers more than just their words on the page. We are writing, giving something of ourselves to the world. So be available. Share yourself with your readers, with other writers trying to learn the craft. You should lift up the art. Lift up other writers. It is selfish to stay in your clique.
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Patricia Smith is an award-winning poet on and off the page – author of eight books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist, and she’s also a four-time National Poetry Slam champion. But what always remains at the center of her work is the fact that Smith is a storyteller. She’s able to situate and fully immerse readers that we bear witness to the most complicated of circumstances with every fiber of our beings, and this craft is mastered and beautifully exhibited in her newest collection.
Winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award, an NAACP Image award, an LA Times Book Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, Incendiary Art has us bear witness to rage, grief, violence, loss, and the fire of resistance through imagery packed with particulars and description and lines that are equally as dense as they are musical, and we always remain aware of our bodies for the adventure that is the collection, feeling such charged emotion from the very first poem all the way through to the end. Smith was available to answer some questions about her award-winning book in advance of her reading at Fresno State on Tuesday, March 5th 2019 in the Alice Peters Auditorium. She responded through email and wrote about the audience for Incendiary Art, the undercurrent of the collection, and her attempts to balance topics both heavy and light.
A Normal Interview with Patricia Smith
“I wanted those gunshots to resound from first page to last”
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Newly released from Anhinga Press, Tina Mozelle Braziel’s full-length poetry collection Known by Salt won the 2017 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, awarded by California State University, Fresno.
A Normal Interview with Tina Mozelle Braziel
The house relates to writing in so many ways for me. A project like this, you can’t think through what it’s going to be like and all the different questions that you’re going to have or all the problems and things that you’re going to have to do. You just have to jump into it, begin working on it, and be willing to improvise and figure things out, learn from people as you go along.
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