I haven’t been to AWP since NYC, so I’m really looking forward to attending this year on home turf.  Pueblo’s about an hour and forty minutes away, so it’ll be cool to have a car at my disposal.  Usually at AWP, I have one panel or event, but this year has me pretty busy with a panel presentation, two readings, and Con Tinta’s annual Pachanga.  This is my first year as an Con Tinta Advisory Circle member, so it’s been a privilege to work so diligently with the other Advisory members on the planning and preparations for this event.  Here’s where I’ll be:

Thursday, April 8 (5:30-8)- Con Tinta’s 5th Annual Celebration honoring Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado & Dr. Alicia Gaspar de Alba.  Laguna’s Mexican Bar & Grill 1543 Champa St., Denver, CO 80202 / 303-623-5321 (Free Buffet / Cash Bar!)

Friday, April 9 (1:30-2:45)-Ecopoetics on Colorado’s Front Range: Intersections and Ecotones. (Soham Patel, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Serena Chopra, Juan Morales, Mia Nussbaum) Room 203 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

(3:30-5:00)-Pilgrimage Magazine Release Party & Reading @ Tattered Cover Book Store-LoDo, 1628 16th Street at Wynkoop; exit Colorado Convention Center on 14th & California; go two blocks NE on California to 16th St.; hop on free 16th Street Shuttle (runs every few minutes) and ride 10 blocks NW to Wynkoop.

(6:30-9:00)- “One Poem Festival” (Hosted by Momotombo Press and PALABRA) Dikeou Collection -1615 California St., Suite 515, Denver, CO 80202 (www.dikeoucollection.org / (303) 623-3001)

Even with all these activities, there will be plenty of time to wander around and mingle with friends and make some new ones too.  I still  have to peruse the panel and readings list to see what else I wanna do.  Next year’s will be in DC and proposals are due May 15.  I guess I better get on that after this one.  One AWP at a time, no?

The Southern Colorado (SoCo) Reading Series and Department of English at Colorado State University-Pueblo will host Colorado fiction writer Steven Wingate at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 9 in the OUC Cottonwood Room.

Steven Wingate is the author of Wifeshopping, which received the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2007. His stories have been published in Gulf Coast and The Journal, Mississippi Review, The Pinch, River City, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Slice, and Quarter After Eight. His poetry and experimental prose has appeared in Brand (UK), Waccamaw, Sonora Review, and Double Room, as well as in the anthologies Diagram.2 and Degenerative Prose: Writing Beyond Category.

Wingate also has reviewed books for American Book Review, Colorado Review, Rain Taxi, and other journals in print and online. Wingate earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a Master of Fine Arts from Florida State University. Since 2001, he has taught writing workshops full-time at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Wingate’s book will be available for sale at the reading as well as other readers’ books through the CSU-Pueblo Bookstore. For more information, contact Juan J. Morales, assistant professor and director of creative writing, at 549-2082 or juan.morales@colostate-pueblo.edu.

Mark your calendars for our final reading for the SoCo Reading Series:

(RESCHEDULED) Thurs. 4/15-Raza Ali Hasan, 7 p.m., CSU-Pueblo Art Gallery

Pueblo Poet Maria Melendez will share poetry focused on environmentalism and other nature-related topics as part of the next Southern Colorado Reading series beginning at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 11 in Colorado State University-Pueblo’s Occhiato University Center Cottonwood Room. The free reading will celebrate her soon-to-be released collection of poetry, Flexible Bones.

Maria Melendez, the new editor/publisher for Pilgrimage magazine, has taught creative writing and American literature at Utah State University and Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind. Her work in community outreach and education includes five years as a poet-teacher in K-12 classrooms with California Poets in the Schools, and three years as writer-in-residence at the UC Davis Arboretum, where she taught environmental writing workshops for the public. Her poetry collection How Long She’ll Last in This World (University of Arizona Press, 2006), received Honorable Mention at the 2007 International Latino Book Awards and was named a finalist for the 2007 PEN Center USA Literary Awards. Flexible Bones, her third collection of poetry, is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in 2010.

Melendez’s work will be available for sale at the reading as well as other readers’ books through the CSU-Pueblo Bookstore. For more information, contact Juan J. Morales, assistant professor and director of creative writing at 549-2082 or juan.morales@colostate-pueblo.edu.

Mark your calendars for additional readings this semester:

March 9: Steven Wingate, 7 pm, OUC Cottonwood Room

April 15: (RESCHEDULED) Ali Hasan, 7 pm, CSU-Pueblo Art Gallery

I hope you can make it for tomorrow night’s reading with Steven Hayward.  You can find the press release below along with a list of three other readers coming soon.

A Canadian fiction writer will kick off the spring semester of the Southern Colorado Reading Series at Colorado State University-Pueblo.

Steven Hayward will present a reading at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Cottonwood Room of the Occhiato University Center. The reading is free and open to the public.

Hayward, who was born and raised in Toronto, is the award-winning author of “Buddha Stevens and Other Stories.”

Other speakers in the reading series are Maria Melendez, Feb. 11; Steven Wingate, March 9 and Raza Ali Hasan, April 15.   All programs begin at 7 p.m. Melendez and Wingate will be in the Cottonwood Room and Hasan will be in the CSU-Pueblo art gallery.

For more information contact Juan Morales at 549-2082 or juan.morales@colostate-pueblo.edu.

Jake Adam York has some great news on his website.  With A Murmuration of Starlings on my mind, I’m stoked to hear that a companion volume, titled Persons Unknown, will be released in November ‘10.  Now I have at least four books in 2010 I’m anxious to read.

Along with Jake’s announcement, you can find some excellent reflections into marketing, audience, and how we discuss our work in academic and non-academic setting.  I, myself, seem to be fearful of speaking about my work appropriately in an academic setting.  Wish I could just say, “I go where the poems tell me.”  Of course, I’m still getting comfortable inside the skin of the second manuscript.

I saw this on a few other blogs, and I wanted to pass it on…

The editors are pleased to announce a call for submissions for A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry.

We are seeking poems that work within the literary tradition of persona poetry: poems written as dramatic monologues, whose speakers employ masks, or whose character and voice are different from the poet’s own.

Please submit up to 5 unpublished poems. We will also consider poems whose rights have reverted back to the author.

All submissions will be accepted electronically. Please send an email to the editors at facesanthology@gmail.com with the poet’s name and “Submission for Persona Anthology” as the subject line, with the poems as an attachment.

Submissions will be accepted October 1, 2009 through January 1, 2010.

As some may already know, Tony Gorsline, Owner and Publisher of Bedbug Press, passed away this summer on June 17, 2009.  Recently in September, there was also a tribute held for him in Brownsville, OR.  This is a truly huge loss for the poetry community, and though it may be delayed, I wish to express my condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues.

It was a true honor to work with him and I am grateful for having the chance to know him.  I corresponded with him a lot via email and was fortunate to have met him during AWP Atlanta, where we spent some time getting to know each other.  Meeting him in person showed me why he touched so many lives with his passion, charm, and kindness.  He was a true lover of poetry, who shared it with the world, and I know he will continued to be missed.

Bedbug Press has been placed on an indefinite hiatus.

Here’s a bit of great news.  Congrats to Gary Jackson on winning the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize!  Look for his book, Missing You, Metropolis, in fall 2010. Read more here.

More updates & posts soon…

It’s been too long since the last update back in February, and it’s already May 15!  Where to start?  

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The SoCo Reading Series came to a successful close.  We had six wonderful readers this year and every event was supported with excellent attendance, book sales, and of course amazing readings.  I hope to start booking for next year’s series, so keep an eye out for announcements about that closer to August.  All the readings during the spring semester were recorded, so I hope to upload them and get them posted on the CSU-Pueblo English Department website in the near future.  

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I wrapped up the semester a few weeks back and in the midst of summer classes.  It can be quite difficult to teach a full semester’s worth of class in a four-week session, and that goes double for two classes.  So far, classes have been excellent, I have some great students, and it will all be done by the time June rolls around.

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A new poem will be coming out in Washington Square in the near future!

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This August, I will be attending The Intensive Workshop at The Frost Place.  I’ve never been to New Hampshire and I haven’t been in a workshop environment like this in a long time.  I’m really looking forward to this opportunity!

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Currently, I’ve been writing & drafting & hoping to get the second manuscript ready to go this summer!  Of course, this means a lot things I’ve been writing don’t fit in the manuscript.  I’d say the manuscript is almost done, but there needs to be about 20 more pages of poems at least to fill in some crucial gaps.  Then, I’ll feel like the book is ready to be subjected to contests, editors, and other interested eyes.

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My students successfully published a new issue of Tempered Steel (formerly The Hungry Eye).  There was a great reading/release party on April 23, and they set the stage for more growth and progress next year.  I can’t wait to work with them more.  I’m proud of them all!

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Once summer classes are done, I’ll be revamping this website and most likely downgrading it.  It’s clear to me I don’t have the time to do regular updates.  I’d rather add a sleeker, simpler design, some good interactive features, and more regular updates.  Wordpress works fine but maybe it’s time for something else.  I also think it’s time to provide a more up-to-date author pic too, no? Plus, I have an iMac now and I would like to use its capabilities.  It’s been wonderful to have a computer that doesn’t crash all the time!

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I guess that’s a start to the update.  I’ll be along to add more updates soon.