September 2023
Moveable Type
Marcus Myers
How did Bear Review begin? Did you have any particular goals when starting the magazine?
Bear Review began ten years ago, after grad school, with the impulse that poet and cofounder B. Rivka Clifton and I had to build a virtual and physical space for good poems, regardless of aesthetic affiliations or credentials.
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More Than Just a Pretty Hat
Philip Metres
What’s the title of that poem?, I asked my friend Dima Psurtsev a dozen times while living in Russia a couple of decades ago, listening to poets in packed halls reading their work by heart.
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Interiority
Douglas Bauer
Early in Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, Claudia McTeer—the younger sister of Frieda and the novel’s periodic narrator—describes wanting to “dismember” her Baby Doll.
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On Torque
Karen Babine
On the screen in front of me, the black swan performs the magic of thirty-two fouetté of Swan Lake. In the fouetté, French for “whipped,” she spins in one of the most difficult sequences in ballet, thirty-two turns en pointe.
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The #AWP23 Keynote
Min Jin Lee, Nancy Pearl
For the #AWP23 keynote address in Seattle, Washington, celebrated librarian Nancy Pearl interviewed author Min Jin Lee. A transcript of their conversation has been edited for the format of this publication.
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The 2023 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature
Duriel E. Harris
Each year, AWP presents the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature to an individual who has made notable donations of care, time, labor, and money to support writers and their literary accomplishments. The award, named after teacher, mentor, editor, and founding member of the AWP Board of Directors George Garrett, includes a $2,000 honorarium, in addition to travel, accommodations, and registration to attend AWP’s annual conference, where the award is publicly announced and conferred. Below is a transcript of 2023 winner Duriel E. Harris’s speech, edited for the format of this publication.
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The AWP HBCU Fellowship
A.J. Verdelle
The official launch of the AWP HBCU Fellowship Program took place at the AWP Conference & Bookfair in Seattle, Washington, March 8–11, 2023. Sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, AWP awarded fellowships to two faculty and four students from Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCU) across the country. These fellowships included conference registration, travel, and lodging costs, as well as honoraria.
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The Lens of the Present
Scott LaMascus
Toni Ann Johnson describes her writing career as an exploration of the most contentious and urgent topics about race in American life and culture, whether the stories have appeared on screen, stage, or in print. In her debut as playwright of Gramercy Park Is Closed to the Public (1994), as screenwriter for Disney’s Ruby Bridges (1998), and her linked short stories in Light Skin Gone to Waste (Georgia 2022), Johnson’s writing is courageous, insightful, and meaningful. She gives her audiences deep and prizewinning explorations of race, polarization, and racism.
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Audible Activism in American Sign Language Poetry
Delicia Daniels
Poetry’s rolling definition in American Sign Language literature positions this genre as an unstable tool, adjustable for all things inclusive. In Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature, edited by H-Dirksen Bauman, Jennifer Nelson, and Heidi Rose, the editors observe the earliest sign for poetry as a mechanism geared towards a hearing landscape.
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Flights of Fancy
Aaron Tillman
Magical realism does not fit easily into any singular category. It is often described as a mode of literary expression, which suggests that it “can characterize works belonging to several genres, periods or national literatures,” 1 and its very name is paradoxical. Works of magical realism possess a “co-presence” of the natural and supernatural that is treated as normal by the narrator.
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More Fully, More Delicately Alive
Helena Feder
At last. Jane Hirshfield’s New and Selected Poems will be published later this month, September 2023. This is wonderful news—for those who have not yet discovered her work and for the rest of us, who already know that through her poetry we become more fully, more delicately alive. Hirshfield is the award-winning author of nine previous collections of poetry, including Ledger (2020); The Beauty (2015), longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (2011), a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award.
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