October 24, 2014 at 4:28 PM
BU Creative Writing wishes you a happy Friday! And here are some literary links to start off your weekend.
Dan Chiasson reviews Claudia Rankine’s latest.
Whoa. A Jane Austen video game, in which one plays to win the sympathy of Elizabeth Bennett.
What Mark Twain’s mother taught him about compassion.
Novelist Don DeLillo reviews a Taylor Swift track.
The Boston Book Festival is this weekend!
Aaron Copland’s 8 Poems of Emily Dickinson.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s advice to his daughter, Scottie (and one Slate writer’s quite strong opinion on it).
How to write a sentence.
The breathtaking third movement of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, “The Alcotts.” (After Louisa May Alcott and her father.)
Hope your weekend is full of wild and whirling words.
By Coordinator
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Posted in Grad Students
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Tagged dan chiasson, don delillo, emily dickinson, f.scott fitzgerald, jane austen, louisa may alcott, mark twain
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October 22, 2014 at 2:16 PM
Check out this wonderful conversation with Robert Pinsky in Stay Thirsty magazine! It's filled with nuggets of wisdom on a slew of things -- from Dante to music to making meaning -- all prompted by insightful questions from Abriana Jetté (Poetry 2012). From the interview:
"It's the sound of meaning that I crave and concentrate on: Frost talks about hearing a conversation through a closed door. A toddler can make the sounds of meaning—which is to say, meaning—in a language, before quite forming words. If one gets that right, then something in the human condition can express itself through you . . . audible to anyone who says the words of your poem, in that person's imagination or actually. You don't need to be there to perform it, the reader will hear it, in that reader's own actual or imagined voice. That is the unique intimacy of poetry."
Congratulations, Abriana, and thank you for sharing this!
Abriana Jetté is an internationally published poet, essayist, and educator from Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals, including the Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, The Iron Horse Literary Review, The American Literary Review, and 491 Magazine. She teaches at St. Johns’s University and the City University of New York, writes a regular column for Stay Thirsty Magazine that focuses on emerging poets and she is the editor of the recently published book, The Best Emerging Poets of 2013, that debuted on Amazon as the #3 Best Seller in Poetry Anthologies.
By Coordinator
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Posted in Alumni, Interviews
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Tagged abriana jette, poetry, robert pinsky, stay thirsty magazine
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October 20, 2014 at 4:56 PM
Karl Kirchwey teaching poetry MFA candidates in the historic room 222.
We're excited to see this article about Karl Kirchwey in BU Today! In addition to being the director of the Creative Writing Program, Karl is an award-winning poet, scholar, translator, arts curator, and teacher of poetry. His work inquires deeply into a vast array of disparate subjects, including physics, biology, Roman history, religion, and mythology--to name just a few. On Karl, Robert Pinsky says, "In a period when some American poets have been concerned either with the problematic nature of language on one side, or the nuances of individual psychology on the other, the presence of historical reality in Kirchwey’s work is to be honored."
We're grateful to have Karl as both our program director and professor of one of the graduate-level poetry workshops. On teaching, Karl says, “For me, the opportunity to talk about poems in the company of other people who care about poetry is huge—it’s a huge privilege and an opportunity."
Read the full article here.
By Coordinator
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Posted in Grad Students, Interviews
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Tagged director, karl kirchwey, poetry, robert pinsky
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September 26, 2014 at 3:24 PM
Hearty congratulations to Tracey Knapp (poetry '04), whose first book of poems, Mouth, has won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award! Mouth will be published by 42 Miles Press (Indiana University) in September 2015. You can read a poem from it here.
On writing the book, Tracey says,
It took a couple years after finishing my degree in poetry at Boston University before a clear path and voice began to emerge out of the many different directions my studies took me. I continued to take workshops outside of academia to keep myself on course, and eventually I was able to hold a group of poems in my hands and say, “Yes, this makes a book.”
Congrats, Tracey!
Tracey Knapp's first book of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award in 2014 and will be published in 2015. Her manuscript was also a finalist for the Four Way Books Intro Prize. She has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers' Workshop and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Mark Strand and Claudia Emerson each selected her poems for Best New Poets 2008 and 2010. Other work has appeared in Five Points, The National Poetry Review, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Connotation Press and elsewhere. Tracey earned a BFA in visual arts at Syracuse University, a Master's degree in English at Ohio University and a Master's degree in Poetry at Boston University in 2004.
By Coordinator
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Posted in Alumni, Awards, Poetry Publications
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September 4, 2014 at 5:59 PM
Kimberly Elkins' (fiction '10) debut novel, What Is Visible (Grand Central/Twelve, 6/14) continues to garner critical acclaim! It received a wonderful review by Barbara Kingsolver on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and was picked as a NYTBR Editors' Choice, in addition to being chosen as The Most Inspirational Book of 2014 by Woman's Day, listed in Best Summer Debuts by the LA Times and Library Journal, and awarded the June Top Fiction Pick by Bookpage. What Is Visible was also featured recently on NBC's Weekend Today Show, and on NPR Weekend Edition.
According to the Washington Post, "Elkins makes this great American woman visible again, in all her remarkable, fully human complexity": The Atlanta Constitution-Journal calls the book "a literary triumph," and the Toronto Star named it "a tour de force, uplifting and powerful." The Atlantic Monthly says:
“Kimberly Elkins gives Bridgman her defiant due in re-imagining her fascinating, now-forgotten story… The world Elkins discovers within is anything but muted. In tactile prose, she evokes a soul and a body with hungers (yes, there is sex) that none of Bridgman’s guides begins to imagine.”
Note that WIV is published by a division of Hachette, and so the battle between Amazon and Hachette is having a profound negative impact on sales--the book couldn't even be pre-ordered!---so if you're going to buy it, please don't buy from Amazon.
Congratulations, Kimberly!
By Coordinator
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Posted in Alumni, Awards, Novels
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August 20, 2014 at 5:22 PM
Exciting news for Luisa Caycedo-Kimura, who recently had two incredibly stirring poems, "Elena" and "Knitting," published in Nashville Review.
From "Elena":
You are alive, your hair
the scent of jasmine. You laugh
as the walls of the room move out
then in, like lungs.
Congratulations, Luisa!
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura, a poet, translator, and Creative Writing Lecturer at Boston University, is the 2014 John K. Walsh Residency Fellow at Anderson Center, the 2014 Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellow at Ragdale, and a 2013 Robert Pinsky Global Fellow in Poetry. Luisa holds an MFA from Boston University. Born in Colombia and raised in New York City, a former attorney, Luisa left the legal profession to pursue her passion for writing. She has received various awards for her poetry and was nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Nashville Review, Jelly Bucket, Connecticut Review, Louisiana Literature, PALABRA, San Pedro River Review, Sunken Garden Poetry 1992-2011, and elsewhere.
By Coordinator
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Posted in Alumni, Poetry Publications
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August 13, 2014 at 5:02 PM
Wonderful news for Sarah Handley (poetry '14), whose poem, "On the Feast Day of John the Baptist," was published in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place! Sarah will receive her MFA from BU in September, and she's recently returned from Scotland, where she was traveling and writing on a Global Fellowship.
Congratulations, Sarah!
Sarah Handley is completing an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where she is a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow. Her poems appear in Angle; A Clean, Well-Lighted Place; and The New Republic.
By Coordinator
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Posted in Alumni, Poetry Publications
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August 12, 2014 at 12:15 PM
Robert Pinsky's "The Art of Poetry" MOOC (Massive Open Online Course, if you're not hip to the lingo) launches this September! With sweet chapters such as "Teasing, Flirting & Courting" (on sonnets), it's bound to be fantastic. The course runs for eight weeks and is run by edX in partnership with Boston University. Join over 10,000 other poetry enthusiasts and sign up for it here.
By Coordinator
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Posted in Events, FYI
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August 12, 2014 at 10:31 AM
Exciting news for poetry alum Kelly Morse (poetry '12), whose piece of flash creative nonfiction, "Ritual", recently came out on River Teeth Journal's Beautiful Things Blog. In addition, another piece called "Open the Door and Here" will appear in Quarter After Eight's upcoming issue.
And if that weren't enough, we are so pleased to hear that Kelly's chapbook manuscript, Natural Language, was a semi-finalist in YesYes Books' Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest!
Hearty congrats, Kelly!
Kelly Morse is a poet, nonfiction writer, and executive director of DEN: the Residency for Parenting Writers. Her work has appeared in Brevity, River Teeth, Alimentum and elsewhere. Currently, she is completing a cross-genre manuscript that explores linguistic and world-view gaps between SE Asian and US cultures based on her experience of living in Hanoi, Vietnam. More about her work can be found at: www.kelly-morse.com.
By Coordinator
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Posted in Alumni, Awards, Poetry Publications
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August 11, 2014 at 4:27 PM
The multi-talented Lisa Hiton has had two poems published in Slice! You can purchase the issue or a subscription to the magazine here. The theme of this month's Slice is escape, and the editor promises that this issue "disrupts our everyday thinking" and "won't let you see you life as you did before."
Congratulations, Lisa!
Lisa Hiton holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University and an MEd in Arts in Education from Harvard University. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Linebreak, and The Cortland Review among others. She has received the Esther B. Kahn Scholarship from 24Pearl Street at the Fine Arts Work Center and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize.
By Coordinator
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Posted in Alumni, Poetry Publications
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