Now is a good time to support authors! Especially those with new books, whose events have been cancelled or postponed. We hope that you are able to support your local bookstores by ordering through stores that are operating or ordering ebooks, as available, through your favorite bookstore. IndieBound has some instructions on ordering eBooks through independent bookstores. 

In addition, we are happy to extend our discount code QAWP20 through June 30th, so you can receive 40% off any Wesleyan book ordered through our distributor HFS Books. We thank the good people at Hopkins Fulfillment Services who have been able to keep our books available. We will keep you posted on developments at Wesleyan University Press.

New Poetry

The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Edges & Fray by Danielle Vogel

Mezzaluna Selected Poems by Michele Leggott

French Guiana Memory Traces of the Penal Colony by Patrick Chamoiseau, translated by Matt Reeck

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century Beyond Lyric and Language edited by Lisa Sewell and Kazim Ali

New Dance

Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict Practicing Bharata Natyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka by Ahalya Satkunaratnam

Celluloid Classicism Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam by Hari Krishnan

Drawing the Surface of Dance A Biography in Charts by Annie-B Parson

Body and Earth An Experiential Guide by Andrea Olsen

BodyStories A Guide to Experiential Anatomy by Andrea Olsen

New Music Trad Nation Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music by Tes Slominski

Recent Poetry Atopia by Sandra Simonds

Frayed Light by Yonatan Berg translated by Joanna Chen

The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells by Annie Finch

 

Congratulations to Brenda Hillman!

Brenda Hillman was chosen by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to receive the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for lifetime achievement. This biennial award, which rotates between poetry, criticism, and fiction, recognizes writers of “progressive, original, and experimental tendencies.” Read the full release about 2020 Literature Award Winners here.

Brenda Hillman is the author of numerous titles published by Wesleyan, including: Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), Seasonal Works With Letters on Fire (2013, winner of the 2014 Griffin Prize for Poetry), Practical Water (2009, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award), Cascadia (2001), Loose Sugar (1997), Bright Existence (1993), Death Tractates (1992), Fortress (1989), and White Dress (1985).

Wesleyan University Press has decided it is best for us to bow out and not attend the 2020 AWP conference. We are truly saddened to miss an event that is one of the highlights of our year. It always seems fitting to begin the spring with this wonderful event to celebrate authors and new literature. We thank all of the AWP organizers for dealing with an unprecedented situation. To call it difficult for them is an understatement. We wish that all of the ongoing participants have a wonderful conference. We hope that you consider supporting your favorite authors and presses who were unable to attend. Check out the #AWPVirtualBookfair hashtag.

We are offering a 40% discount off of our books until 6/30/20, to honor our conference discount. When you check out at HFSBooks.com, use discount code QAWP20 on any Wesleyan title.

 

 

We will have a number of new poetry collections The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Atopia by Sandra Simonds, Edges & Fray by Danielle Vogel, The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells by Annie Finch, Frayed Light by Yonatan Berg, and Mezzaluna by Michele Leggott, The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Laura Vrana, and a new volume in our popular American Poets series, North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language edited by Lisa Sewell and Kazim Ali

Be sure to join Carnegie Mellon University Press and Akron University Press for poetry reading, on Wednesday, March 4th, 8 to 9:30 pm at La Villita Cafe, a short walk from the conference center. Readers include  Hayan Charara, Dora Malech, Bridget Lowe, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Virginia Konchan, Annah Browning, Emily Corwin, and Oliver de la Paz. Free appetizers will be available while supplies last.

[This post was updated on March 3, 2020]

 

    

PEN America President Jennifer Egan and this year’s judges—Hari Kunzru, George Elliott Clarke, Alexis Okeowo, Lila Azam Zanganeh, and Viet Thanh Ngyuen—have announced that M. NourbeSe Philip is being honored with the 2020 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, in recognition of her esteemed body of work.

The PEN/Nabokov Award is PEN’s most prestigious Career Achievement Award; it is conferred annually to a living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, represents the highest level of achievement in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and/or drama, and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship. Previous winners include Sandra Cisneros, Edna O’Brien, and Adonis.

The award will be conferred at the 2020 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony, hosted by Seth Meyers on March 2, at The Town Hall in New York City. The Literary Awards Ceremony is a prestigious celebration of literature, honoring leading authors before an audience of the nation’s most distinguished publishers, editors, literary agents, journalists and philanthropists.

NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist and playwright who was born in Tobago and now lives in Toronto. She practiced law in Toronto for seven years before deciding to write fulltime. Philip has published four books of poetry, one novel, and three collections of essays. She was awarded a Pushcart Prize (1981), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba, 1988), the Tradewinds Collective Prize (1988), and was made a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry (1990). Her most recent book of poetry is Zong! (Wesleyan, 2008) is a moving work of experimental verse drawing upon the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert—a case that dealt with the intentional drowning of 150 Africans by the captain of the slave ship Zong in order to recoup insurance monies for the ship’s owners.

In 2015 Wesleyan published the first US edition of She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Break—first published in Cuba as winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize.

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“This highly useful resource combines great selections of poetry by eleven female innovators, whose work opens up new streams of thought on history, society, language and authority, with brilliant essays about them.”
–Elizabeth Gregory, author of “Apparition of Splendor”: Marianne Moore Performing Democracy through Celebrity, 1952-1970

North American Women Poets in the 21^st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language is an important new addition to the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. This unique organization makes these books invaluable teaching tools. Broadening the lens through which we look at contemporary poetry, this new volume extends our reading of each poet beyond the constraints of any one aesthetic, school, or movement; this volume pushes readers to see beyond the binary of lyric and language. What unites the varied approaches of these writers is a commitment to creating new fields, new idioms, new vernaculars, and new forms. Key areas of conflict and concern, among the eleven poets, include genre and the nature of the lyric, connections between gender and aesthetics, and the nature of poetic language.

Among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Catherine Cucinella on Marilyn Chin, Meg Tyler on Fanny Howe, Elline Lipkin on Alice Notley, Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine, Brian Teare on Martha Ronk, Michael Cross on Leslie Scalapino, Lynn Keller on Cole Swensen, Khadijah Queen on Natasha Trethewey, Lisa Russ Spaar on Jean Valentine, Julie Brown on Cecilia Vicuña, and Richard Greenfield on Rosmarie Waldrop.

From the book:

LISA SEWELL is a poet, editor, and professor. She was born and raised in Hollywood in Southern California. She received a BA from UC Berkeley, a MFA from NYU, and a PhD from Tufts University. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Her poems employ the confessional mode to examine the underbelly of human connection and existence. Sewell’s poetry collections include The Way Out, Name Withheld, and Impossible Object. She also co-edited the last volume of the American Poets in the 21^st Century series titled Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21^st Century: Poetics Across North America.

KAZIM ALI is a poet, editor, prose writer, and professor. He was born in the UK to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian, and Egyptian descent. Ali was raised in the United States and Canada before going on to receive a BA and MA from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an MFA from New York University. He is currently a professor of literature and writing at the University of California, San Diego. Ali’s poetry collections include The Far Mosque, which won Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day, Sky Ward, and Inquisition. His work explores the intersection of faith and daily life.

 

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“Danielle Vogel is an ‘architect of relation,’ and Edges & Fray is a book of thought’s loving, living obedience to form. It is one of the lessons we need most right now.” — Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Silence & Song

Edges & Fray is an embodied meditation that cultivates receptivity and deep listening to the ways we inhabit language and its ethereal resilience. Combining close observation of birds’ nests and the writing process, Danielle Vogel brings the reader into communion with language as a mode of presence. The frayed edges of consciousness are carefully arranged to suggest how writing, and the book, can serve as a site of radical transformation. Experimental and deeply grounded, this work is lyrical and patient. The text creates overlapping ecological fields, wherein each field is a system always in a state of becoming. Described as a “series of filaments,” here is one example from the book:

we read debris and make seemingly complete shapes

 

what we experience :

a series of fragments

and the ethereal impulse

of an entirety

 

 

 

nests have taught me about the miniscule —

— that haunts toward the whole

the book becomes a breathing record

 

Finding its strength in fragility, Edges & Fray is personal without feeling private, experimental without feeling programmatic. Its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.

DANIELLE VOGEL is a cross-genre writer and visual artist. She is the author of numerous other works, and she has contributed chapters to in the anthologies Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) and The Poet’s Novel (forthcoming from Nightboat Books, 2019). Vogel has been a visiting lecturer at Brown University and a visiting artist at the University of Washington at Bothell and Naropa University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Creative Writing at Wesleyan University, where she specializes in contemporary poetry, creative nonficition, documentary and eco-poetics, and cross-genre and interdisciplinary forms.

“It is beautiful and amazing to have access to the vast range of invention, intensity, and surprise that Lorenzo Thomas’s poetry offers. His contribution is indispensable, immeasurable and—even now, even here—unbound. ”
—Fred Moten, author of The Little Edges

“This generous tome of too-hidden genius griot-bodhisattva Lorenzo Thomas shimmers with an alert curiosity and humanity’s tender blues.  An important figure of second generation New York School practice as well a son of Black Arts and companion to Umbra, Thomas has never wavered in his celebration of ancestors from Pharoah Hohemreb to Leopold Senghor to Jimi Hendrix. “Stir it up” Thomas writes, and he does. This Collected is a magnificent intervention of poetry’s orality in a radical time he was very much a part of.”
—Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism

“Lorenzo Thomas is an essential poet of postwar America. His sumptuous poetic inventiveness is grounded in searing social consciousness. Through dazzling sound patterning and the deft interplay of conflicting voices and discourses, Thomas proves the necessity of aesthetic pleasure for waking us from the slumber of complacency. ”
—Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry

Born in Panama to Afro-Caribbean parents, Lorenzo Thomas (1944−2005) grew up in New York City, where he participated in the Umbra Workshop. Influenced by the work of the Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire, Thomas was part of the Black Arts Movement. After serving in Vietnam, he was writer-in-residence at Texas Southern University, where he helped edit the journal Roots. He was a professor of English at the University of Houston for more than two decades, starting in 1984. From 1973–1979 he served as Writer in Residence at Florida A&M University.

Over his illustrious career, he was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, the Lucille Medwick award, the Poets Foundation award, the Committee on Poetry Grant, and the Dwight L. Durling Prize in Poetry. His published works include Don’t Deny My Name (2008), Dancing on Main Street (2004), Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry (2000), The Bathers (1981), and Chances Are Few (1979).

Thomas’s poetry synthesizes New York School and Black Arts aesthetics, heavily influenced by blues and jazz. In a career that spanned decades, Thomas constantly experimented with form and subject, while still writing poetry deeply rooted in the traditions of African American aesthetics. Whether drawing from his experiences during the war in Vietnam, exploring his life in the urban north and the southwest, or parodying his beloved Negritude ancestors, Thomas was a lyric innovator. The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas is the first full collection of works spanning across four decades of his career, including poems never before published in books.

 

Song

You asked me to sing
Then you seemed not
To hear; to have gone out
From the edge of my voice

And I was singing
There I was singing
In a heathen voice
You could not hear
Though you requested

The song–it was for them.
Although they refuse you
And the song I made for you
Tangled in their tongue

They wd mire themselves in the spring
Rains, as I sit here folding and
Unfolding my nose in your gardens

I wouldn’t mind it so bad

Each word is cheapened
In the air, sounding like
Language that riots and
Screams in the dark city

Thoughts they requested
Concepts that rule them
Since I can’t have you
I will steal what you have

 

LORENZO THOMAS (1944−2005), was a critic and poet, and published volumes of scholarship as well as numerous essays, including several histories of the Umbra group.

ALDON LYNN NIELSEN (editor) is the author of Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation. He is the George and Barbara Kelly professor of American literature at Penn State University.

LAURA VRANA (editor) is assistant professor of English specializing in African American literature and poetry at the University of South Alabama.