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The Poetry Foundation winners of the 2018 Poetry Incubator Seed Grants.

“When you’re a student of poetry, you’re lucky if you don’t realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.” Tony Hoagland in Ploughshares

The Poetry Foundation recently announced the winners of the 2018 Poetry Incubator Seed Grants. The $2,000 grants are made possible by the Mellon Foundation and are awarded annually to two members of the Poetry Incubator cohort for their community works initiatives. This year’s winners are Victor Jackson of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Ashley Mack-Jackson of Indianapolis, Indiana.

“Victor and Ashley are poets whose creative work is nurtured by and in service to their communities. It is incredible to witness the passion that they bring to their own creative work and to giving back,” says Ydalmi Noriega, Community and Foundation Relations Director. “We are grateful to be able to provide seed grants for their projects that will help them grow as poets and organizers, continuing to bring a spirit of service and collaboration wherever they go.”

Nine of the 24 Incubator Fellows submitted grant proposals. Unlike other grant programs, which require applicants to submit to an outside committee, the seed grant recipients are selected by and accountable to their peers, the other Fellows. This year’s winners were chosen for the strength of their commitment to their home communities, clear goals, and actionable visions.

Victor Jackson’s OURchive is a two-part archival initiative, seeking to empower Philadelphia through the idea that​ all people deserve to be valued and protected regardless of talent, class, belief, gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or ability​. OURchive will begin with gathering a community-based space in in Uncle Bobbie’s Cafe and Bookstore, nicknamed “People’s Sanctuary,” then grow into a digital archive hosting art, literature, and journalism around social justice, social reform, and the survival of oppressive systems. The digital archive will be a resource both for those in Philadelphia and worldwide who want to better understand the city’s cultural contributions and history.

Ashley Mack-Jackson’s extension of Indianapolis’s Word As Bond builds on a resource already available in her community by developing a paid internship program. Word As Bond has provided free creative writing training to Indianapolis youth since 2013. Mack-Jackson’s project increases the program’s offerings in summertime, when many young people who would otherwise avail themselves of Word’s resources have to work. The Word As Bond Summer Internship Program offers an alternative to typical seasonal employment, giving interns the opportunity to grow their creative practice with compensation for that labor. This internship not only helps young poets grow as artists, but understand the value of their work.

The Poetry Incubator, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and Crescendo Literary, brings emerging poets from across the United States to Chicago to spend three days learning from esteemed poetry faculty about how to enhance their craft while proactively serving their home communities with art. There is no fee to apply to or attend, and Fellows have the option to stay in university housing free of charge. The program culminates with the Chicago Poetry Block Party, a celebration of poetry, music, and art.

Applications for the 2019 Incubator will be released in 2019.

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, visit poetryfoundation.org.

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Poet and writer, I was once columnist and associate editor of a regional employment publication. I currently run this site, The Poet by Day, an information hub for poets and writers. I am the managing editor of The BeZine published by The Bardo Group Beguines (originally The Bardo Group), a virtual arts collective I founded.  I am a weekly contributor to Beguine Again, a site showcasing spiritual writers. My work is featured in a variety of publications and on sites, including: Levure littéraure, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature,Compass Rose, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, Second Light, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta / Phor(e) /Play, and California Woman. My poetry was recently read by Northern California actor Richard Lingua for Poetry Woodshed, Belfast Community Radio. I was featured in a lengthy interview on the Creative Nexus Radio Show where I was dubbed “Poetry Champion.”

The BeZine: Waging the Peace, An Interfaith Exploration featuring Fr. Daniel Sormani, Rev. Benjamin Meyers, and the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi among others

“What if our religion was each other. If our practice was our life. If prayer, our words. What if the temple was the Earth. If forests were our church. If holy water–the rivers, lakes, and ocean. What if meditation was our relationships. If the teacher was life. If wisdom was self-knowledge. If love was the center of our being.” Ganga White, teacher and exponent of Yoga and founder of White Lotus, a Yoga center and retreat house in Santa Barbara, CA

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton

 

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Martín Espada, the first Latino to be awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Reading at Fall for the Book 2014, Puerto Rican -American Poet, Martin Espada (b. 1957) – photo courtesy of Slowking4 under GFDL 1.2

“Even the post political poem is an act of faith.” Martin Espada

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is presented annually to a living US poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant singular recognition. It is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets and, with a prize of $100,000, one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. The award is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, and will be presented to Espada at a ceremony at the Poetry Foundation on Monday, June 11.

“Martín Espada’s work and life tell the real and lived story of America, in which the importance of poems and legal rights go hand in hand,” said Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine. “A tenants’ rights attorney before he became a celebrated and cherished poet, Espada’s passions are as compelling and apt as his precisions—both now more timely than ever.”

Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. He earned a BA in history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a JD from Northeastern University. As an attorney, he served as supervisor of Su Clínica Legal, a legal services program for low-income, Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea, Massachusetts, outside Boston. As a poet, an essayist, an editor, and a translator, he has dedicated himself to the pursuit of social justice, fighting for the rights of Latino/a communities and reclaiming the historical record from oblivion. His greatest influence is his father, Frank Espada, a community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer who created the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project and founded East New York action in the ’60s.

“To receive a lifetime achievement award in the form of the Ruth Lilly Prize is a great honor that causes me to reflect: on my father, as artist and activist, who died four years ago; on Jack Agüeros, the first poet I ever met; on the days I sat outside the courtroom, scribbling poems on legal pads; on the people in the poems I write, Whitman’s ‘numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known.’”

Espada’s latest collection of poems from Norton is Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990).

He has received a Shelley Memorial Award, a Robert Creeley Award, a National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, a PEN/Revson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. Collections of Espada’s poems have been published in Puerto Rico, Spain, Chile, France, Germany, England, and Turkey. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of a Mexican American studies program outlawed by the state of Arizona and has been issued in a new edition by Northwestern University Press. Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Martin Espada’s website is HERE. His Amazon page is HERE. Follow the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine on Facebook at facebook.com/poetryfoundation or on Twitter @PoetryFound.

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Emily Dickinson First Book Award recognizes an American poet who is at least forty years of age

The Poetry Foundation announced recently that poet Kristen Tracy won its 2017 Emily Dickinson First Book Award for her manuscript Half-Hazard. The occasional prize (last awarded in 2012) is designed to recognize an American poet at least 40-years-old who has yet to publish a first collection of poetry. Tracy’s manuscript Half-Hazard, which was previously a finalist for the Yale Younger Poet Prize and a semi-finalist for the Walt Whitman Award and Sarabande Books’ Kathryn A. Morton Prize, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2018. The cash award is $10,000. Tracy was honored at the Pegasus Awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation on June 12.

KRISTEN TRACY grew up in a small Mormon farming community in Idaho. She earned an MA in American Literature from Brigham Young University, an MFA from Vermont College, and a PhD in English from Western Michigan University. Her poems have appeared in more than two dozen literary journals.

“The Poetry Foundation is proud to recognize Kristen Tracy, whose manuscript was selected from more than one thousand submissions to this year’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award contest, and to partner with Graywolf Press in publishing these distinctive poems,” said Poetry Foundation President Henry Bienen.

In describing Half-Hazard, Jeff Shotts, Executive Editor at Graywolf Press, noted that it is “full of warnings and dangers, as well as wry observations, and also full of a kind of joy made sweeter by its being earned, lived, and perceived.” Shotts continued, “It’s a great honor for Graywolf to publish Tracy’s unusual and accomplished debut through our ongoing collaboration with the Poetry Foundation and the Emily Dickinson First Book Award. Discovering important new voices is at the heart of this award and the missions of both the Press and the Foundation.”

Tracy’s book, Half-Hazard, is scheduled to be published by Graywolf Press, fall  2018.  Meanwhile, you can visit Kristen Tracy’s website. She also writes for children, tweens and teens, so it’s a site full of cheer and color. Her Amazon page is HERE.

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.

The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit poetryfoundation.org.

ABOUT THE POET BY DAY

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Spanglish as a Proper Language

Video posted to YouTube by PoetryFoundation.

Animated poem by Maurice Kilwein Guevara. Part of the Poetry Everywhere series produced by the Poetry Foundation in association with docUWM at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Animation by Kristin Vogel.

Sábado feliz a ustedes.

Sonrisa … y poema encendido …

♥