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UNCG acquires archives of Augury Books and Brooklyn Arts Press

Statement from Joe Pan, Publisher of Augury Books:

Hello friends!

This is just a post announcing that we’ve sold the Brooklyn Arts Press / Augury Books archive to my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where all the books, proofs, pamphlets, awards, errata, and paraphernalia will be sifted through and studied by students of English, publishing, and creative writing, in perpetuity.

I couldn’t be happier that the archive has found a home here, where so many great writers hail from and have taught. This includes the famed editor Jim Clark, who allowed an under-read but ambitious undergraduate on as intern for the Greensboro Review and helped shape his future in publishing, and where great writers like Fred Chappell and Stuart Dischell and Lee Zacharias pushed me to study the craft of writing more extensively.

It’s really something to go through these boxes containing 15 years of something I started up in my kitchen, by self-publishing my first book. BAP has given me such pleasure and so many unforgettable memories over the years, introducing me to writers and artists beyond the scope of my imagining…and I really mean that, I didn’t imagine the extent to which BAP would be part of my life, nor where it would carry me. One can’t help but get nostalgic piecing through everything—57 published books between BAP and Augury Books, along with the 12 Kate Angus published with Augury before me. We’re so incredibly lucky that the fire/flood only took three of the fourteen boxes containing all these memories. I’ll rest easier knowing everything’s locked up in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives.

My thanks goes out to Terry Kennedy, who helped float the idea, to Stacey Krim, Assistant Professor & Curator of Manuscripts, who has been helping me with ideas on how the archive might be catalogued and set up for presentation, and to Kathelene Smith, Carolyn Shankle, and Sarah-Esther Belinga of UNCG, who will be helping the archive as it expands. My thanks to my wife, Wendy Pan Millar, without whom BAP wouldn’t exist; Kate, without whom Augury wouldn’t exist; to the many writers of BAP and Augury, without whom this archive would not exist; and to you, readers of books, without whom books wouldn’t exist.

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David Joel Friedman (1939-2021)

We here at Augury Books wish to celebrate the life of poet David Joel Friedman, who won the 2012 Augury Books Editors’ Prize with his poetry collection, Soldier Quick With Rain.

Sadly, David passed away earlier this week.

Below you’ll find a loving tribute from his friend and fellow poet Geoffrey Nutter, included here with his permission.

But first, here’s a short excerpt from David’s poem “Having Said That”:

“Having said that, let me say this. It is too soon to be a number-cruncher. It is too late to be a second-guesser. But it is right on time to be a hedgehog. Indeed the blue sky is a skein.”

With much respect & admiration, The Editors

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Arisa White interviewed by Matthew Zapruder at The Adroit Journal

The Possibility the Horizon Grants: A Conversation With Arisa White

“[W]hat I’ve come to realize is that through poetry I am charting the inner life, and often traces of that linger as object, in memory, in historical record. So now, I must investigate my own inner life and the inner lives of those around me. This is where that poetic impulse takes over, to wonder, turn over, feel and draw connections. When I’m reconstructing an inner life, my own included, I’m using my body as the verb—the is, to be—in metaphoric equations. It is through my metaphors that I’m better able to tell an emotional truth that often goes unnoticed.” (read more)