Scientists announced last month that they had recorded the sound of two black holes colliding and merging a billion light-years away. The sound was described as a small, quick, birdlike chirp. Create a list of object pairs; the items can be clearly connected—like a red car and a blue car, or you and a loved one—or disparate, or conceptual. Choose an especially inspiring pair from your list and write a poem about the two objects as they head on a collision course, and the unexpected sound that’s heard when they finally merge. 

Christopher Soto (aka Loma) is a queer latinx punk poet and prison abolitionist. Originally from Los Angeles, they now live in Brooklyn. Their first chapbook, Sad Girl Poems, is newly released from Sibling Rivalry Press. They have an MFA in poetry from New York University where they studied with Eileen Myles. For more information, visit christophersoto-poet.com.

Following the release of my chapbook, Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), I decided to go on a national tour to end queer youth homelessness. Much of my writing in this initial chapbook discusses my personal relationship to domestic violence, gender tourism, housing instability, etc. I wanted to talk to poetry communities and queer youth across the country about these experiences and about producing poetry in the age of mass incarceration. What does it mean to write about queer youth homelessness while over two million people are incarcerated in the U.S.? What is the historical (and literary) relationship between homeless queer youth and mass incarceration? I wanted to talk about my poems and my histories. I wanted to talk about Vanguard, S.T.A.R. (street transvestite action revolutionaries), The Young Lords, Sylvia Rivera, the Nuyorican Poets Movement, June Jordan, Miguel James, and so on.

Independently, I was able to book events at a handful of universities and organizations. Yet, I was not able to book and venture to smaller organizations which could not afford my travel, accommodation, and reading fees. Artists need to get paid for their labor. We are the thinkers, feelers, culture producers, visionaries in the county! This is where Poets & Writers comes in. At several of my readings in New York City and Chicago, the hosts applied for (and received funding) from Poets & Writers so that I can come speak to their communities. Thank you Poets & Writers! This funding allows me to travel and speak and be paid for the artistic work that I do. I believe that one of the greatest ways to appreciate an artist is to financially support their lives lived as creative people. Currently, the status quo in many literary communities is to underfund artists. Many organizers believe that artists are getting paid with visibility and recognition. These frameworks are false. When artists are not paid it is classist and exploitative (not a privilege). We need to be able to pay for food and rent and living! I am so thankful to Poets & Writers for the funding that they provide to creative people and literary organizations.

I am so thankful for the opportunity to read at all of the universities that have invited me to speak. I remember growing up, and as a teenager listening to spoken word artists feature their work around Southern California venues (such as A Mic and Dim Lights). I wanted so badly to be invited to speak as a feature for someone. I wanted so badly to share my work with the world. Now, years later, I am doing it. I am speaking and writing and traveling and making money from my poems: these little words thrown across the page. My tour dates will be available on my website christophersoto-poet.com and my creative work is also available online for anyone who wants to take a gander. I guess, I will close by saying this: PAY YOUR ARTISTS / END QUEER YOUTH HOMELESSNESS / DEMAND RESPECT FOR YOUR LIFE AND FOR YOUR WORK / YOU DESERVE IT.

Photos: Christopher Soto. Photo credit: Irmand Trujillo

Support for Readings & Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support form the Louis & Anne Abrons Fondation, the Axe-Houghton Fondation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust and Friends of Poets & Writers, as well as by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others.

What was your worst subject in school? Write an essay about that subject and why you found it so difficult. Does the experience still influence the way you process information? Have you developed a passion for what you once couldn’t crack? Use this prompt to study your own approaches to learning, and how your mind and personality may have changed over time.

2016 is a Leap Year, meaning February gets an extra day on Monday, February 29. Push this one step further and invent—instead of an extra day—an extra month. Where would this thirteenth month fall in the calendar? In what season? Would it be named for an event or a person? Write a story that takes place within this month, using the invented details to enhance the story’s plot and tone. 

If you’re having trouble starting a poem, begin at the end. Take a single collection of poems and make a list of the last two words from each poem. Then write your own poem using only these words. Be vigilant at first utilizing just the vocabulary from the list. After a couple of drafts, stray from the limited words to help bring the poem to its full realization. 

Adrienne Perry serves as the current editor of Gulf Coast, is a Kimbilio Fellow, and a member of the Rabble Collective. She earned her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Perry's work has appeared or is forthcoming from Copper Nickel, Tidal Basin Review, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and Indiana Review.

What makes your organization (press, series, etc.) and its program(s) unique?
Houston, Texas is fortunate to have a vibrant literary community and Gulf Coast hosts just one of its several popular reading series. Over the last few years, the Gulf Coast Reading Series has welcomed to the same stage authors in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, and authors who live and work outside of the Bayou City. At any given reading, we offer a mix of poets and prose writers, some of whom are up-and-coming and others who are—like Jamaal May, Caitlin Horrocks, Wayne Miller, and Wendy Walters—established in their careers. A Gulf Coast reading may take place on the shadowy second floor of Rudyard’s British Pub or among the brightly lined shelves at Brazos Bookstore. Parts of the reading may be in Old English or in Korean. Either way, these readings are entirely student-run and they are fierce. As the only nationally distributed journal of literature and fine art in Houston, we feel a need to make each reading worth folks’ while. 

What recent project and/or program have you been especially proud of and why?
Most recently, Gulf Coast partnered with the Failure to Identify Series and Project Row Houses to bring 2015 National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis to the Eldorado Ballroom. We’re proud of this reading not simply because it was an honor to have Robin reading beneath the Gulf Coast, Project Row Houses, and Failure to Identify banners, but because we are eager to pair up with other arts and cultural organizations in Houston to produce exceptional programing. People still remember Caitlin Horrocks’s reading from her story “Mermaid and Knife,” and we know people will remember Robin’s reading for a long time, too.

What’s the craziest (or funniest or most moving or most memorable) thing that’s happened at an event you’ve hosted?
This question brings out my inner drama queen. Recalcitrant audiovisual devices, late speakers, readers who hijack the microphone, albeit in a well-meaning way—but all of the ups and downs have actually been run of the mill. That said, during a reading at the Houston Printing Museum, the artist Chitra Ganesh was talking about the virtues of Choose Your Own Adventure books when the sky opened up and rain pounded onto the roof, interrupting her for several minutes. Or, maybe it was when one of our fiction editors, Dino Enrique Piacentini, brought his own prop—a little red Dirt Devil vacuum—to a surrealist-themed reading at the Poison Girl Bar.  

How do you cultivate an audience?
This is such a good question and I think this is something we still work on. Because we want to both cultivate an audience and at the same time serve those folks who’ve been devoted to us across time. Cultivating an audience is about making sure that our programming doesn’t just speak to one kind of people. We’re conscious of trying to mix up poets and prose writers, include and acknowledge different identities, aesthetics; and our reading series curators, Martin Rock and Erika Jo Brown have been phenomenal at this. Our events are free, but that doesn’t mean we should be nonchalant about the fact that busy people have taken time out of their day to give a nod to art, to beauty. There’s a kind of responsibility in that. We’ve also learned to stop going it alone. When we pair up with others, our programs are inevitably richer.

What do you consider to be the value of literary programs for your community?
Houstonians love literature in a deliciously unpretentious way. Houston comes out to hear writers who bring them pleasure. We don’t stop enough to consider the vulnerability and pleasure that comes from seeing someone read their work. It’s more than self-expression; it concerns a different way of hearing and seeing and, most importantly, reading.

Photo: Adrienne Perry  Photo credit: Lesli Vollrath

Support for Readings & Workshops events in Houston, Texas is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

The University of Georgia Press has announced that poet Christopher Salerno of Caldwell, New Jersey, has won the inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize for his collection Sun & Urn. Salerno will receive a cash award of $1,000 and publication by the University of Georgia Press in February 2017. He will also be invited to read his work at the prize’s sponsoring institutions—the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University—and will receive an additional $1,000, as well as travel expenses, for each reading.
Christopher Salerno is the author of three previous poetry collections: Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2006); Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Press, 2010), which won the 2011 Mississippi Review Award; and ATM (Georgetown Review Press, 2014), which was selected by poet D. A. Powell for the 2014 Georgetown Review Poetry Prize. Salerno currently serves as associate professor in the creative writing and MFA programs at William Paterson University in New Jersey.

Thomas Lux, the final judge of this year’s award, said of Salerno’s manuscript, “Christopher Salerno’s Sun & Urn is a highly accomplished (he has learned his trade!), a madly imaginative, and, ultimately, a brilliant and deeply human book. Read it, please, thrice!”

The Georgia Poetry Prize is a national competition established in 2015 to celebrate poetic excellence. The prize is to be administered annually; submissions for next year’s prize will be accepted from October 1 to November 30. Visit the website for submission guidelines and more information.

Go outside, with only yourself. Find an isolated bench. Or stay near and settle into a chair at home. Or climb the rungs to the roof and take your place above the city. Sit. No phone, no laptop. Nothing but you and you. For about thirty minutes or so, sit and do nothing. And when you’ve been there long enough to settle into yourself, to feel the voice that’s deepest inside you, the one that only you know, the one that only you hear, go and take up the page or turn on the screen. Listen. Start an essay from that hidden voice. 

This week’s creative nonfiction prompt comes from Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren’t (Soft Skull Press, 2015). Read Talbot’s installment of Writers Recommend for more inspiration.

“‘Working in a soup kitchen is great for a writer or any artist. There are many unproductive days when you might hate yourself otherwise. You are eating the food, using the water, breathing the air—and NOT HELPING. But if you feed the hungry, you can’t deny you’re doing something worth doing,’” writes Annie Dillard to John Freeman in “Such Great Heights” by Freeman in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Write a scene in a short story in which a character with creative inclinations feels like he’s not being a helpful member of society. How does he shake himself out of it? Does his chosen course of action help his productivity as an artist? What does this change reveal about his place in the world of the story?

Since 2011, P&W has supported creative writing workshops for Los Angeles seniors through the sponsoring organization EngAGE, a nonprofit that fosters the arts, wellness, and lifelong learning for seniors in Southern California. It started with workshop leader Hannah R. Menkin, and since then P&W has supported workshops led by Morgan Gibson, Mike "the Poet" Sonksen, Michael C. Ford, and Oshea Luja. The workshops, which now take place at both the Burbank and North Hollywood Senior Artist Colonies, bring together creative seniors in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and some even in their nineties. Participants are multitalented—some paint, some sing, some act—and all of them have discovered or rediscovered a love of writing. In part two of a two-part blog report, Jamie Asaye FitzGerald, director of the Readings & Workshops (West) program, reflects on an interview with a few of the workshop participants. (Be sure to check out last week’s blog post by the McCrindle Foundation Readings & Workshops Fellow, Melissa Sipin.)

One of the most gratifying aspects of teaching creative writing is witnessing what flows forth when a student, who had no idea they could write or thought they couldn't, discovers they can. Now imagine if that student were someone in their seventies, eighties, or nineties.

"I don’t believe I wrote a poem before I started the workshop," said Abigail Howard, when we sat down to interview her and fellow participants in the P&W–supported poetry writing workshops presented by EngAGE.

Similarly, Jean T. Ritchie commented: "I have never been involved in poetry writing in my life," and ninety-three-year-old Lucius Foster said: "I’ve avoided it all the way through. But things are changing, things are happening...."

Things really are happening at the Burbank and North Hollywood Senior Artist Colonies, where workshop participants have found out something late in life: They can write—and it gives them satisfaction and purpose. 

"I didn’t know I had it in me," said Ritchie. "And I’m very proud."

Foster held P&W staff rapt as he read a poem about his escape from a German POW camp in which he exchanged clothes with a German civilian and rode off on her bicycle, then regaled listeners with other stories of his incredible World War II experiences.

Kit Harper, who has always been an avid writer, credits the workshop with rekindling her passion for poetry: "It is the great passion of my life, I love it very much, and I am at my happiest when I am sweating over the computer." She continued, "I’m grateful that I’ve been given this gift, and I want to do something of value with it."

Harper commented that the workshop has taught her "to blow Darth Vader off my shoulder. The little critic that says: You can’t do it. You’re not Dylan Thomas. That stuff goes on forever!"

The workshop gives students the tools to steer clear of other barriers. “I keep practicing,” says Howard, “I keep picking up the pen. It’s like I forget how to do that. And we come here together and I remember how to do it again.”

It doesn’t take a study to see how these writing workshops are enhancing the lives, not just of the seniors in these workshops, but of the teachers who teach them, and anyone who comes to listen to their wise and wonderful words.

See photos and video from the 2015 Lit Crawl event, On Being a Kid: A Poetry Reading by Los Angeles Senior Artists, which featured participants from the P&W–supported EngAGE writing workshops at the Burbank and North Hollywood Senior Artist Colonies.

Photos (from left): Workshop participants Kit Harper, Jean T. Ritchie, and Lucius Foster. Photo credit: Tess. Lotta.

Major support for Readings & Workshops in California is provided by the James Irvine Foundation and the Hearst Foundations. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.