After being cancelled due to the pandemic last year, this year’s Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) Celebration of the Literary Arts has gone virtual. Two poets are scheduled to headline the Wednesday, March 3 event that will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Zoom. Traci Brimhall and Nomi Stone will each read excerpts from a selected work. Brimhall, the author of four poetry collections and a children’s book, was selected for the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and has appeared in
The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares, Orion, The Believer, The Nation and
Hoops (2006), and
Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include
Best American Poetry 2019,
Renga for Obama, and
Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in
Art Beat: The Big Prize wmuk.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wmuk.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Megan Neville (she/her) is an educator and writer. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets (Poets.org), Cherry Tree, Pleiades, wildness, Cream City Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Boiler, McSweeney s, Lunch Ticket, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere. She is a poetry reader for Split Lip Magazine and was a finalist in Write Bloody s 2019 book contest. She lives in Tremont with her spouse and three cats. Find her online at megannevillepoetry.com.
TO THE WOMEN WHO SURROUNDED THE PENTAGON
Memorious.
INTRODUCTION
My formal study of poetry came somewhat late, and in Boston, a city of poets. I had the good fortune of working with Andrea Cohen at the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, a series that my teacher, Gail Mazur had founded thirty years earlier. I took tickets, sold books, turned the lights on and off, and sat in the darkness with poets listening to other poets. Sometimes the well-known poets were on the stage, sometimes they were the ones in the audience listening to first-book poets. There were also memorable tribute readings. We were all in it together, in this magic realm of poetry in a small room that held the history of so many great poets. I learned that poets need one another and learn from one another at all stages of life and career. I learned poetry from listening, from the rhythms of different poets washing over me every Monday night. I learned to contribute. Poetry should be a world where any of us can live.