This week we welcome Martin Stannard as our guest blogger. Martin is a poet and critic from England. He was editor of the magazine joe soap's canoe from 1978 to 1991, and was the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Nottingham Trent University, 2007-8. After a couple of decades ekeing out a living as a poet visiting schools, leading workshops, and doing (very) occasional readings (including at St. Marks and the KGB Bar in New York City) he moved to China, where he teaches English and other humanities subjects at Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Faith (Shadowtrain Books, 2009) and How To Live A Life: Selected Uncollected Poems 2002-2009 (Argotist Ebooks, 2010). Two collections of his reviews, critical essays and occasional writings have also been published: Conversations with Myself (Stride, 1999) and Respondings (Argotist Ebooks, 2011). He has collaborated with English printmaker Dale Devereux Barker on two art/poetry books, and with poet Mark Halliday on a series of short plays, a few of which have appeared in print in The Indiana Review, The Colorado Review and some other journals not all of which have the word "Review" in the title. He and Halliday are embarking, even as we speak, on a set of collaborative stories, the first of which is currently just 5 sentences long, but destined to be longer. Much longer. His homepage can be found here, but it's somewhat out-of-date since Typepad became one of several blogging systems unusable in China, so he stopped paying for it. A new martinstannard.com site is in the pipeline, but it seems to be a very long pipeline, and patience is recommended.
Welcome, Martin.
In other news . . .
Save the Date: Thursday, September 22, 2011 - The Best American Poetry 2011 Launch Reading. 7 PM, Tishman Auditorium of the New School (66 West 12th Street, NYC) Series Editor David Lehman and Guest Editor Kevin Young will be joined by John Ashbery, Cara Benson, Michael Cirelli, Michael Dickman, Farrah Field, Major Jackson, Jennifer Knox,Katha Pollitt, James Richardson, Patricia Smith, Gerald Stern, Bianca Stone, Mark Strand, and Lee Upton.
