Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Apostrophe Blog Archive”
What joy to be able to praise a great poetry book written by a dear friend! David Pickering’s debut collection, Jesus Comes to Me as Judy Garland, won the 2020 Airlie Prize and was published by Airlie Press in September 2021. I was touched and honored when he asked me to write a blurb for it….
Every now and then, you write a poem that you think will never find its true readers. Who wants to publish a persona meets ekphrastic poem about a now long-gone work of art? “The Great and Marvelous Sugar Baby Has (Not) Spoken” was one of those poems for me. Luckily, the women at Visitant, a new online journal for literary pilgrims, decided to publish it back in June 2016…
“With this collection of memoir writing, both prose and poetry, Cayuga Lake Books presents our third anthology to feature creative work by authors who live in the Finger Lakes region of New York or have left without ever forgetting what this part of the country means to them…
My poem, “In the Kingdom of Perpetual Night” was published in Scintilla Magazine’s Issue #10, Winter 2016. The poem’s title elides into the first line of its opening stanza…
Recently, I had some fun writing in a new-to-me poetry form called the fib. I am hardly a mathematics nerd—in fact radically far from it. But playing around with these constraints was actually fun. And I found it a useful way to uncover the gist and pith of a few old poems that needed significant revisiting and revising…
In December 2004, I was awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship—specifically, the Leslie Bradshaw Fellowship for Literary Nonfiction. What an honor! Several months later, the 2004 class of recipients was fêted at a lovely ceremony at the Wieden + Kennedy offices…
It’s easy to find clarity and insight, to conjure up the best advice for oneself when looking back in time, isn’t it? What was once a mass of confusion, a morass of to-do lists and frenzied scramblings that seemed to be going nowhere…
My chapbook, Eternity a Coal’s Throw, was published by Burning River Press of Cleveland, Ohio in 2012. Chris Bowen, the editor, had a very interesting process for making his chapbooks stand out from the crowd. Each one included an introductory essay that talked about a bit about the “how” and the “why” that led to the writing of that particular group of poems. In my case, this collection was all about the place I grew up, the anthracite coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania…..
“The Finger Lakes Region of New York is easy to find on a map. But is there something intangible here, a spirit that can touch the human heart? This anthology of poems from more than 100 authors includes the well established and those just commencing the poetic craft. You will find a wide variety of voices…
Anchor & Plume Press of Baton Rouge, Louisiana published my long poem, Great Hunger, as their first-ever “pocket book” on St. Patrick’s Day 2016. As part of the volume’s launch, I answered a few questions for Anchor & Plume editor, Amanda Mays. Below is an excerpt of our conversation….
