November 2022
Writing for the Freshest Air
Michael Colbert
Jason Mott is the author of four novels and two books of poetry. His novel The Returned was adapted by Brad Pitt’s film company into the TV series Resurrection, and his most recent novel, Hell of a Book, won the National Book Award in 2021. It was also nominated for the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
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Black Lives Matter & the Poetics Of Justice
Philip Metres
At a speech for Black writers in 1976, June Jordan said, “As I think about anyone or anything—whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film—as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment/possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is, always, where is the love?”
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Disorder in Suspension
J.D. Scrimgeour
In Stanley Kunitz’s late poem, “Halley’s Comet,” the speaker remembers a time in first grade when Halley’s comet would be passing near the earth, threatening to destroy it. The recreated first-grader’s mindset is charming: “At supper I felt sad to think /that it was probably / the last meal I’d share / with my mother and my sisters; but I felt excited, too / and scarcely touched my plate.”
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A Conversation with Sonia Sanchez
Chapman Hood Frazier
Sonia Sanchez has written nineteen collections of poetry, seven plays, three children’s books, and two collections of non-fiction. She has edited two anthologies, made thirteen voice recordings, and she has been a monumental force in the Afri¬can American literary tradition. Sanchez was one of the recipients of the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award in 2022.
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Murdered, or Concealed
Sara Hailstone
In Chapter 10 of Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, “Ice Women vs Earth Mothers: The Stone Angel and the Absent Venus,” Margaret Atwood asks her reader “why no Canadian writer has seen fit—or found it imaginable—to produce a Venus in Canada?”
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Containing Multitudes
Alicia Ostriker
The 19th-century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is famous for claiming that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” What I believe he meant is not that poets sit in parliaments debating tax policy—God forbid—but that they define our emotions, our values, our convictions regarding reality and meaning—and that from time to time they can shape history.
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Don’t Tell Me What To Do
Debra Spark
We all know what sucks about the last almost three years. So, in the interest of not re-hashing the obvious, my go-to, let’s-get-to-know-each-other question for the undergraduates I taught in 2020 and 2021 was “What’s one positive thing about the last two years of your life?” Which is only a way of asking: “Of what use constraint?”
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