An Excerpt from ‘you’re the most beautiful thing that happened’ by Arisa White

 

There are little words
that can fit in little places
if you say them small enough.

To fit a song into a pore
you have to be prepared
for the day it will sweat.

If words could stick on people,
if spoken, they would become
a different creature.

Blinded and you’re turned
five times around. Nothing
in you knows what it knew.

It’s the best part of the game:
Prick the girls you like best
while pinning on the donkey’s tail.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the author of the chapbooks Disposition for Shininess and Post Pardon. With funding from the City of Oakland, Post Pardon was adapted into an opera. Her full-length collections Hurrah’s Nest and A Penny Saved were published in 2012. Her debut collection, Hurrah’s Nest, won the 2012 San Francisco Book Festival Award and was nominated for a 44th NAACP Image Award, the 82nd California Book Awards, and the 2013 Wheatley Book Awards. Member of the PlayGround writers’ pool, her play Frigidare was staged for the 15th Annual Best of PlayGround Festival. One of the founding editors of HER KIND, an online literary community powered by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Arisa has received residencies, fellowships, or scholarships from Headlands Center for the Arts, Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Rose O’Neill Literary House, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a 2013-14 recipient of an Investing in Artist Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, which funded the dear Gerald project, a regional representative for Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and a faculty member in the BFA Creative Writing program at Goddard College. Her poetry has been widely published and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. Arisa is a native New Yorker, living in Oakland, CA, with her wife, Samantha.

More on Arisa White.

Mayapple Center Is Accepting Applications for Summer Program

Mayapple Center for the Arts and Humanities

The Mayapple Center for Arts and Humanities is now accepting applications for its summer program. The Creative Writing program offers two week-long residency classes for adults, two guest lectures, and one weekend day program for high school students.

Summer faculty in the adult program include Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and Cate Marvin, co-founder of VIDA, the organization of Women in Literary Publishing. Summer guest lecturers include Meghan O’Rourke, recipient of the 2014 Guggenheim Award for General Nonfiction, and Brenda Shaughnessy, Poetry-Editor-at-Large for Tin House magazine. The summer high school program instructor is Kate Angus, recipient of the Spring 2014 Orlando prize for Creative Nonfiction from the A Room of Her Own Foundation.

The Mayapple Center creates space to cultivate imagination through artistic and intellectual cross-pollination in a distinctly 21st century climate. Artists and scholars of exceptional stature come to teach and collaborate with small groups of dedicated, like-minded participants. Located just one hour north of New York City and easily accessible by car or Metro North, Mayapple offers diverse programs for adults and youth in a retreat environment where pressures of quotidian life are suspended, freeing participants and faculty to pursue artistic and intellectual passions. The Center is located on a masterfully designed campus whose serene lake and peaceful landscape of trees and gardens serve to inspire its residents. Activities such as swimming, tennis, canoeing, yoga and meditation promote a strong sense of community among residents, with an emphasis on mindfulness. The center’s holistic approach to artistic growth and development is also demonstrated by our dedication to sustainability. Our meals are partially prepared from organic produce from Mayapple gardens, and we serve locally-sourced food at every meal.

Read more on the Best American Poetry Blog.

For more information or to apply to summer classes, please visit www.mayapplecenter.org.

VIDA Interview: Augury Founder Kate Angus on Aesthetic Diversity

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Just in time for the end of our reading period (5 days left, folks!), our own Kate Angus talks to VIDA’s Melinda Wilson about the issue of diversity and bias in the literary arts while also addressing the principles that have shaped Augury since its inception. Here’s a little teaser from the interview:

What we want more than anything is to publish more titles—the more books we can send out into the world, the greater statistical likelihood that they will reflect the multiplicity of personal experience and aesthetic range that we are interested in. —Kate Angus

Read the whole interview in VIDA’s Editor’s Corner here: http://www.vidaweb.org/editors-corner-10-kate-angus-for-augury-books

In the meantime, it is NOT TOO LATE send us your poetry manuscripts or short fiction collections on Augury’s Submissions Page. Get in under the wire before our reading period closes at 11:59 p.m., June 30, 2013.

Enjoy!

—Augury Books