The Best American Poetry

Speaking of Funny Women: Time to Buy Nin Andrews' "The Secret Life Of Mannequins" from Kattywompus Press

If you've been following this blog, you've read Nin Andrews' Meet the Press feature for which she interviews the unsung editors of small pressses.  But if that's all you know of Nin, you are in for a major treat: she's one of the funniest, most original poets around and she is also attracting a large following for her hilarious parodies and cartoons, many of which can be found on her blog here.  Click on the cover image above or here to buy her book.

On Saturday, April 28th at 7 PM, join Nin Andrews, Robert Miltner, Karen Schubert, and Eric Anderson  from Kattywompus Press for an evening of poetry, books, and footsteps overhead at Mac’s Backs, 1820 Coventry Road, Cleveland, OH 44106.  More information here.

-- sdh

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Joe Pan of Brooklyn Arts Press

NA:  Tell me a little about the press. Who started it, how long has it been in existence?

JP:  I founded Brooklyn Arts Press (BAP) in 2007, partly in response to watching modern dancer friends, artists, and filmmakers successfully establish their own companies, and partly out of frustration of having my own book get short-listed for a few prizes while continuing to shell out contest entry fees unsustainable on a copyeditor’s budget.  So I started BAP with my own book, with hopes of publishing 4 or 5 new poetry books a year. I’d published some of the poems in my collection in lit journals and had the rest generously picked apart by peers and professors at Iowa, so I felt like I’d paid my dues in terms of editorial scrutiny; plus, starting with my own book, I was free to make the mistakes I couldn’t afford to make with the works of other writers. I picked up book design pretty quickly, having worked for ad agencies, and blindly inched my way through the troubling, shifting terrain of printing, distribution, and marketing. It was great to have total  control over my words and the final product, and the responses I received from writers I admired, to whom I sent copies, were well-worth the time, effort, and money. That winter, after recouping the initial investment with sales, BAP opened its doors to poetry submissions. About that time I took a gig as a Co-Director of an art gallery, and while making studio visits around New York, stumbled upon some amazing artists, which is how BAP began publishing art monographs. In 2009 we halted publishing because the stuttering economy killed sales. Since then we’ve bounced back. In 2010 the sheer number and quality of submissions jumped dramatically. In 2011 we started a poetry chapbook series and began generating revenue, gaining recognition in the community for the quality of the books we publish, both in terms of writing and overall aesthetic. Several of our books eventually found their way to “Best of the Year” lists. And 2012 is looking to expand upon that awesomeness. We attended AWP for the first time, and will be at  conferences and book festivals here in New York.

NA: What makes your press unique?

JP: In terms of small presses, not much. We’ve had years with income and years without, like most independents, though Small Press Distribution, whom we signed with last year, has done spectacular work in getting our books noticed. Our first chapbook, Joe Fletcher’s Already It Is Dusk, hit their bestseller list, as did Carol Guess’ Darling Endangered (our first foray into lyrical fiction). Sales overall have spiked. As a distributor SPD connections are as varied as they are valuable. They have access to libraries and universities and secondary buyer channels.

 A few things that differentiate us from other presses might be that we don’t hold contests or charge for submissions. If you charge a contest fee, you’re beholden to choose a winner. We never want to put ourselves in that position. BAP is less a business venture than a love affair. If I’m going to spend 6-8 months reading, editing, designing, publishing, and marketing a book, it’s because I believe in the author and the work. By the end, I feel as if the book is partly my book, too, and can’t imagine engaging in a process, in a relationship, that from the outset I suspect will lead to a hapless marriage.

Our motto is Pay It Forward. The profits from each book, minus shipping costs, royalties, and promotion, get put into producing the next new author’s book or a subsequent print run of the original book. I don’t pay myself anything. Our editors do it for the same reason I do, and many of our readers and designers are former BAP authors and artists giving back. We compensate them with copies of the books they work on. Most of our authors and artists get  an honorarium plus copies, and we split the eBook proceeds with them 50-50. For future print runs, we work on a sliding scale, so if a book sells out and we enter a subsequent run, the author receives another batch of author copies and an equal or larger paycheck than the first. If we’re lucky, one big seller pays for the publication of two or more new books. It’s usually the costlier art monographs that contribute the bulk of this service.

NA:  How many books do you publish each year?

JP:  Last year we published 4 books. We have 3 lined up for summer 2012 but our submission period just ended a few weeks ago and the batch of full-length manuscripts we’re reading now is promising. We receive between 100 to 250 manuscripts per reading period, January and June, and choose 0 to 4 for publication.

NA:  How do you promote your books?

JP:   The best form of promotion is self-promotion. One of the tragic ironies of MFA programs is the lack of classes devoted to the business aspects of managing your art. When I’m writing, I’m not thinking sales. When I’m sitting across a café table with my agent, I’m thinking sales, I’m thinking marketing. If I’m not, I run the risk of publishers taking advantage of me. Remember, not so long ago big house publishers were offering writers 5% royalties on eBooks being sold for $9.99 per unit. I’ve recently read a blog post that suggests 35-45% should be the rate, if the publisher and writer are meant to split costs and profit equally. We settled on a 50-50 split because the math is easier, and because writers deserve more for their efforts.

So we encourage self-promotion, be it on a blog or with Twitter account or Facebook or by a shouting maniac on a street corner.  We bring to the table print availability via our website, SPD, and Amazon, and eBook availability through our website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Sony, the iBookstore, and anywhere else we can place them. We email-blast a newsletter and update our Facebook profile. We send out review copies, asking our authors to provide 10 to 20 places that might be amenable to reviewing their work, so that authors can sort through the aesthetic camps themselves. We distribute to ocal bookstores and to any bookstore where the author is doing a reading. Readings sell books. As do book parties and book launches. When we launched Jonathan Allen’s art book Superstructure at the Lu Magnus gallery in Manhattan, the lovely owners let us hang his work for a night.  I brought a keg of beer and we invited everyone we knew and we sold books. But the biggest asset we have is the writer. Even an agoraphobic germaphobe has access to the internet, and some days I’m not too far off that description myself. In the end, word-of-mouth is our best resource.

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Kristy Bowen of Dancing Girl Press

Ed note:  During AWP, Dancing Girl Press will participate in an open studio event with book signings on Saturday, March 3, from 1pm-8pm at our studio space just up Michigan Avenue in The Fine Arts Building, 410 S Michigan, studio #921, Chicago.

NA:  Tell me about Dancing Girl Press.

KB: The dancing girl press chapbook series publishes a yearly schedule of handmade chaps devoted to work by emerging      women authors.  We are also particular interested in the intersection writing and visual arts, so the studio as a whole produces a number of book, paper, and ephemera related arts.  We have been housed in the historic Fine Arts Building in Chicago for the last 5 years.

NA:  What inspired you to start a press?

KB: In 2001, I had started an online poetry journal, wicked alice, so the press was a product of both a desire to put something a little more tangible than html out into the world, as well as a personal interest in art and book design.  Once I had given it a trial run with producing a chapbook of my own, it was no time before I had lined up our first author (the late and fabulous Adrianne Marcus) and secured a saddle stapler, some cardstock, and a decent printer.  There were a lot of great micropresses proliferating around that time (Effing Press, Big Game Books, also lots of journals entering the physical book realm Diagram/New Michigan Press, Tarpaulin Sky), so I decided to throw my hat in.

NA:   Why do you only publish women-poets?

KB: My background as a reader, writer, and scholar has always been women’s writing, so when I founded wicked alice, it was my intent to focus my publishing efforts there, mostly just as a way to define the endeavor.  Over time, it became more of a political act, as again and again, statistics showed the dearth of writing by women in the poetry world and in the general poetry conversation, and not just historically. I feel like my role, as an editor and publisher, is to get those books out there, to increase the number of women poets taking part in that conversation, particularly emerging writers at the point where their work is taking off.

NA: How many books do you publish each year?

KB: Over the years we’ve grown from publishing around 5 books to around 30 each year.   Our publication list is usually a mix of submissions and solicitations. We’re pretty lucky in that we’re pretty much self-sufficient, each book funding the next and so on.  I sell artwork and accessories to maintain our studio space, but the books are pretty much keeping each other rolling.  I hope to continue to grow as large as finances and time constraints allow, since I feel like the more we get books out there into the world, the more people there are reading them, talking about them, sending us amazing work.

NA:   How do you attract and promote writers? How do readers find out about your books?

KB: Mostly, it’s all word of mouth.  A lot of our poets wind up sharing news about their books, or touting other books we’ve published, which leads to more people taking an interest and sending us work. Social networking is increasingly a big part of it. As with most poetry publishing, the author does the bulk of the work in promoting and we’re lucky that so many of our poets do it so well. We’ve also built up a good following of steady readers who purchase our titles quite regularly.

NA:  What kinds of work are you particularly interested in publishing?

KB: I have a pretty open mind when it comes to styles of poetry, ranging from more innovative and conceptual work to traditional lyric and all things in between.  The only requirement is that it interest me in some way, be it subject matter, style, format, use of language. As I mentioned, I also love books that engage with the visual arts in some way, so we occasionally publish manuscripts that include drawings, photography, diagrams, charts, etc. (either by the writer or in collaboration with a visual artist.) Also, books that engage socially and historically or with other texts.  I also like surrealism, dreams, logical illogic.

NA:  I would love to see a poem or two from one of the books you have published that somehow exemplifies your aesthetic.

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Rodger Moody of Silverfish Review Press

NA:   Silverfish Review Press has been a press since 1978.  Have you always been the editor?  How has the press evolved since then? 

RM:  I’m the founding editor. Silverfish began as a literary magazine publishing three issues a year. One of the issues was a poetry chapbook. The magazine published, poetry, prose poetry, short fiction, translations, and interviews. The last issue was released in 1997. Around 1996 Silverfish began to shift its focus to full-length poetry titles.

NA:    What inspired you to become an editor of a press?

RM:  When I was a graduate student at the University of Oregon (1976 - 1978) I had a work-study job at Northwest Review. My job was to pick up the daily mail, log in the submissions and distribute them to the poetry and fiction staff. I had the opportunity to eavesdrop on staff meetings and conversations between the editors. When I was about to graduate it occurred to me that starting a literary magazine would be a way to keep in touch with the writing community. I thoroughly enjoyed graduate school and was concerned about being swallowed whole by working just to pay the rent. What I really wanted to do was to learn the ins and outs of book publishing.

NA:  How many books do you publish each year?  How does one become a Silverfish poet?

RM:  The press releases two titles a year, three if the financial support is available. Silverfish sponsors the annual Gerald Cable Book Award for a poet who has yet to publish a full-length collection and there is a second series which is generally by invitation only though Silverfish will read unsolicited manuscripts.

 NA:  You began as a chapbook press and then began doing full-length books.  Do you still publish chapbooks?

RM:  Silverfish no longer published chapbooks. I love everything about the chapbook format. I’ve hand sewn a few which is a fun learning experience. I’ve also had a few printed with spines. Selecting endpapers is challenging, and fun. But because the format is physically small, bookstore owners are reluctant to stock chapbooks. They simply get lost on the shelves. I’m also enamored of the pamphlet format.
   
NA:   A lot of presses are funded by universities, but Silverfish is an independent press.  How do you stay afloat, especially in economic times like these?

RM:  Over the years I’ve learned how to network with our distributor --Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. Silverfish is a nonprofit c 3 501 tax exempt literary organization. And though fund-raising is more difficult than I had anticipated, Silverfish has been fortunate to have had generous patrons and a few donors who give small, annual donations, some year after year. Author readings and reviews help get the word out about new and backlist titles. It also helps that Garrison Keillor has read several poems by Silverfish poets on The Writer’s Almanac and that reviews have appeared in publications such as Library Journal, Booklist, and The New York Times Book Review. And the press has been fortunate to consistently receive grant support.

"As a writer, all bets were off." A eulogy for Eleanor Ross Taylor by Ross Taylor

This lovely tribute to Eleanor Ross Taylor (June 30, 1920 – December 30, 2011) by her son Ross.... comes to us from family friend Nin Andrews:

My mother was born at home in south-central North Carolina in 1920.  Her father was a farmer.  Her mother, Jennie, was mostly a farmer’s wife, but was also a seamstress, taking jobs sewing things for neighbors far and near.  She kept up on fashionable patterns.  As a teenager, my grandmother painted a very respectable picture of a mother and child, which was hanging in my mother’s room at her death.  She and Fred, my grandfather, often enjoyed discussing bible stories and texts in quiet, thoughtful tones.  For rural folk in the depression, this was the light of culture.  

My mother had two brothers and a sister, who did a number of remarkable things.  Both brothers, James and Fred, worked playing minor league baseball for a while.  Both brothers published well regarded novels.  Her sister Jean married poet Donald Justice and published a volume of stories.

In 1943 my mother married my father, Peter Taylor, who went on to write stories and plays and won the Pulitzer Prize for one of his novels.  He was from the city – or several, as his family moved a few times.  I should de-emphasize him in a piece about my mother, but he was very sociable and introduced mom to many people she came to love.

My mother was a teetotaler.  At the many parties she attended with my father, mom would stand happily conversing with her arms folded, not even disguising her abstinence with a glass of soda.  Some partiers admitted feeling intimidated by this. 

Many readers note, rightly, the unflinching determination to face truth in my mother’s poems.  I think the flip side is that she had courage in the face of real fear.  She was physically small, and, having recently watched her go through the diminutions of old age, her second childhood, I have become more aware of the country girl child in her.  She was inquiring (she saved stacks of clippings about astronomy, the brain, physics, paleontology) and she knew the world was a great and terrible place. 

She also loved watching cloud formations.  Most of her poems tell stories about people, but around the edges is an awareness of the creeks and mountains.  I feel her interest in gardening, birdwatching, even in people’s cats and dogs was a conventional expression of her love of the natural world. 

Perhaps a well known quote by Flaubert helps to explain her conventional life: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”  As a mother, she was lovably predictable.  As writer, all bets were off.

Nin Andrews takes on Rilke

Go to Nin Andrews's blog and read her "Torso of Marilyn Monroe." Do it today! 

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews interviews Amanda Raczkowski and Joseph Reed, co-editors of Caketrain Journal and Press

NA:  The first question I have: who comes up with your cover art?  I think everyone should click onto your website to see the beautiful covers. 

AR & JR: About 90% of the time, the cover art is sourced from the existing work of an artist, and so it comes from all sorts of different places. For the issues of the journal, the decision is ours and we basically go on a wild search through artist portfolios on the web until we find something that seems to make some intuitive sense to us. For the single-author titles, we always try to consult the author first—many of them have some loose idea of what they’re interested in, and we go from there. In a couple of cases—Claire Hero’s afterpastures and Elizabeth Skurnick’s Check-In, for example—the author actually selected the cover art themselves; other times—like Ryan Call’s The Weather Stations and Kim Parko’s Cure All—we tried out a number of different options before landing on the one we wanted; and very occasionally—as in the case of Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine and Matt Bell’s The Collectors—we’ve actually designed the cover illustration ourselves.

Perhaps the best story of a cover coming together, though, was in the case of Bird Any Damn Kind. We went through mock-up after mock-up, always ending up either unable to find the rights holder or unsatisfied with the results, and it got to the point where the deadline was fast approaching, the layout was done, and we still needed a cover. And then Lucas Farrell, the author, finally let slip that his wife, Louisa Conrad, is an accomplished visual artist. A quick scan of her portfolio and we knew we were on our way; there’s a real conversation going on between his writing and her visuals which made her the perfect choice.

NA:  How would you best describe your press?  How many books do you publish each year?  Are all of your books contest-winners? 

AR & JR: Caketrain is an independent journal and press imprint run by two people out of their apartment in Pittsburgh. We champion the broadening of literary horizons and reward literature which demonstrates daring and a willingness to experiment. We publish four books each year: the winner and runner-up of our annual competition, a single-author title acquired by us outside of the competition, and an issue of our annual journal.

NA:  You are located in Pittsburgh.  Do you do a reading series in Pittsburgh? Do you have a local presence? 

AR & JR: Our efforts to date have been concentrated entirely on the books themselves. We haven’t really done much in the way of readings, not only because we lack the time and energy for a reading series, but because there are plenty of groups in the city—The New Yinzer and Open Thread, for example, not to mention the many universities—who already build literary community through local events more effectively than we ever could. While we’re not very prominent in that community, we do feel it’s important to give attention in venues like this to the fact that one could scarcely imagine a better place to make books than here in Pittsburgh. From the very beginnings of Caketrain, we’ve experienced an outpouring of support and a feeling of shared concerns on a local level that has been instrumental to keeping us in the mindset of sustaining this project.

NA: I first heard about your press from Tom Whalen, whose book, Dolls, was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the 2006 Caketrain Chapbook Competition.  Have you published other collections of prose poetry and flash fiction?

AR & JR: There’s a lot of flash fiction and prose poetry in the journals, but as far as the collections go, a lot of our books blur lines in this respect. All the Day’s Sad Stories and The Collectors are novellas told in what is essentially flash fiction; Ghost Machine and Cure All both have elements of prose poetry and flash fiction in them; our next book, due in early 2012, is a memoir told in paragraphic blocks that are something like poetic flash fictions. We don’t really concern ourselves an awful lot with where these things belong in terms of genre.

NA:  It looks as if you have chosen not to sell many of your books on Amazon.  Am I correct? 

AR & JR: Caketrain paperbacks are available exclusively through Powell’s Books and www.caketrain.org. Our growing catalogue of ebooks is available through both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as directly through www.caketrain.org.

NA:  Tell me about some of highlights of the press.  Feel free to provide links to interviews, events, or reviews.

AR & JR: The past year has been incredibly exciting for us. Ghost Machine was selected as one of the top 20 poetry books of 2010 in The Believer’s annual reader survey; after several reprints, it now holds the distinction of being our best-selling title to date. Sarah Rose Etter’s Tongue Party was released last May and is presently giving Ghost Machine a run for its money. Perhaps most incredibly, just last month, Ryan Call—whose debut collection, The Weather Stations, was published by us this past March—received a Whiting Writers Award. All of this leaves us exhilarated, proud, thankful, and hopeful for the year to come.

Amanda Raczkowski and Joseph Reed are co-editors of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Caketrain Journal and Press. Their work consists of editing and publishing an eponymous literary journal, nine issues to date; and a press imprint, which has issued chapbooks and full-length titles from Elizabeth Skurnick, Tom Whalen, Claire Hero, Matt Bell, Tina May Hall, Kim Parko, Ben Mirov, Lucas Farrell, Ryan Call, Sarah Rose Etter, and Sara Levine.

Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort  was published by CavanKerry Press in 2010. Follow Nin's blog here.

Bagging the Whole "Be" Thing (Posted by Bruce Covey)

Yesterday I said I was going to talk about distribution paths for poetry, but mine certainly isn’t any kind of definitive word.  We choose how we give and get our poems; we choose which poems we love and hate, both of our own and others.  The cultural shift from canonicity to community implies that the notions of “poets anointed” or the “cream of poetry” are merely modes of discourse, rather than something objectively “true.”  Editors choose the contents of a journal as forms of self-expression in the voices of like-minded poets from the same poetic community.  Best American Poetry is an editor’s expression of a range of voices that sparks conversation about other great poems from the year, and what “best” means for each of us.  For me, the most interesting journals and anthologies make loud choices—i.e., are able to recognize the extremes of their chosen aesthetic(s).  I count BAP among the best anthologies.  I count No Tell Motel, Court Green, LIT, Word For/Word, Jubilat, Jacket, No Posit, Octopus, Columbia Poetry Review, Aufgabe, Denver Quarterly, Anti-, Ping-pong, Tarpaulin Sky, H_NGM_N, 1913, Noo, Glitter Pony, Pank, Lana Turner, RealPoetik, Shampoo, and Weave as just a teeny few of many, many, many awesome journals being published today, in a wide variety of aesthetics (see the forthcoming “links” page on the forthcoming new Coconut for a more extensive listing). 

Let’s scare you up some drama. An 18th century peepshow. A typical entertainment of the time period. Take a look. Through this peephole. The dimensions pile on, revealing a poor paint job. There I was, fearless and standing on tables. Now I am something vivid. You are some thing. Seaward. What are whales? Why are whale hunted? In your sleep I start stealing your slow-ish motions. A puddle of pale blue on the floor. The most delicate patch of it. In the city their hands smell of oranges. Soon I will stop. Matching you stroke for stroke. I count the scratches on your back. I name them like ships.

            --Lily Ladewig, from “Shadow Boxes,” from the current Word For/Word
 

The shift from canonicity to community implies that hard-drawn aesthetic “lines in the sand” are outmoded.  “Experimental” and “traditional” are meaningless, with form and narrative and epiphanies and visual poetics and Black Mountain influences and lang-po influences all thrown into the same mixing bowl.  In a room full of Frank O’Hara disciples one will find 50 radically different poets.  Similarly, we need not feel ashamed if our poetic influences include, for instance, John Berryman among a dozen great NY School poets.  This isn’t to say that all evaluative categories for poems must be defenestrated; instead, however, I propose that we consider relative value (originality, profundity) within the context of particular, vital poetic communities (or within the context of a single poet’s trajectory) as a more effective measure of greatness. 

Once in a while the contents are so varied that one cannot label a drawer. How to categorize the scrap of pulse and ankle length of twine? One begins to fail the crucial moment—pulling out anchors in flight time, wrongfaced watches. When the hinge catches, panic fuels the tug of war; one can only push or pull. The secret stash half exposed, the runner off its track.

--Hanna Andrews, from Slope Move, forthcoming from Coconut Books

The Vida numbers seem particularly devastating for me in this age of community poetics.  A vital community should, of course, not only be open to anyone, but should embrace diversity.  A vital community doesn’t make assumptions about poetics based on gender or race.  A vital community is individuals honoring the poetics and identities of its members through open conversation. 

I love hosting a reading series, even if before each event I get nervous that the audience won’t be big enough or that I’ve forgotten the mic.  More than anything I want the readers to be happy—to feel like they have a good setting to perform in.  I love meeting new poets.  I love going to readings.  I love giving readings.  I love buying and trading books at readings and conferences (avoiding the three-letter conference out of respect for Nin!).  I tend to buy books more frequently from poets with whom I’ve had contact.  I buy books full of exciting (to me) poems, of course, but I also buy books from poets I like, even if I’m not the perfect audience for their poetics.  Poets aren’t poets if we only stand in the corner and don’t join the party, even though, of course, we choose who to talk to and avoid the bullies.

I haven’t met Sawako Nakayasu in person, but we’ve emailed a lot.  I love her poems.  Her brand new book (Mouth: Eats Color: Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals) just arrived in the mail today.  On first glance it seems to question the whole notion of authorship with ("collaborative"? "translated"?) pieces written by or attributed to other poets (Mina Loy, Harry Crosby, Frances Chung).  Lines and whole poems in Japanese.  A handwritten reproduction.  The whole book an intimate conversation, as if everything is translation. 

                        Insects 

                        Insects multiplied with the speed of an electric
                        current.
                        Lapped up the boils on the earth’s crust. 

                        Turning over its exquisite costume, the urban night
                        slept like a woman.

                        Now I hang my shell out to dry.
                        My scaly skin is cold like metal.

                        No one knows this secret half-covering my face. 

                        The night makes the bruised woman, freely twirling
                        her stolen expression, ecstatic.

Tomorrow:  more about forthcoming Coconut books.

Bruce

 

 

 

Nin Andrews and Nicole Santalucia, Guest Bloggers November 6-12

This week we welcome Nin Andrews and Nicole Santalucia as our guest bloggers.

Nin Andrews’ poems and stories have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies includingPloughshares, The Paris Review, Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2003), The Best American Erotic Poems, and Great American Prose Poems.   She won an individual artist grant from the Ohio Arts Council in 1997 and again in 2003 and is the author of several books including Spontaneous Breasts, winner of the Pearl Chapbook Contest, Any Kind of Excuse, winner of the Kent State University chapbook contest, The Book of Orgasms published by Cleveland State University Press,  Why They Grow Wings published by Silverfish Press and winner of the Gerald Cable Award. Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, published by Web Del Sol,Sleeping with Houdini, published by BOA, Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum, published by Subito, and Southern Comfort, published by CavanKerry Press. She is also the editor of a book of translations of the French poet Henri Michaux entitled Someone Wants to Steal My Name from Cleveland State University Press. She keeps a blog of her daily comics here. 

Nicole Santalucia is the poetry editor of Harpur Palate and is pursuing a PhD in English with a concentration in creative writing at Binghamton University. She made the 2011 Convocation Address at Cazenovia College and has recently received an honorable mention grant from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice.  In March of 2012 she will read her work at the Poetry Center in Paterson, NJ for the the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award reading event.  Nicole also leads the Graduate Student Readers’ Series at Binghamton and assists the director of The Binghamton Center for Writers- two projects she enjoys because they motivate others to read, listen to, and discover poetry.

Welcome, Nin and Nicole.

-- sdh

BAP 2011 Comics continued (Jennifer Grotz) by Nin Andrews

Read the complete poem here.