First, National Poetry Month at The Rumpus continues with Paula Bohince’s “The Flint River” and Adam McGovern’s “Perseid meteors, 2015.”
Meanwhile, the inimitable Brandon Hicks illustrates the exhaustive contents of his 2005 Saturn Ion.
Then, in the eighth installment of The Conversation, Jayson Smith and A.H. Jerriod Avant ponder the question, “Can you envision a life for yourself in the South?” Smith struggles with the connections he’s made to the Big Apple, while Avant laments a paucity of funding for the arts in the South. The two also consider pressing questions about race, authority, and “exile” in today’s society.
And in the Saturday Interview, Katie Salisbury talks to Vivian Lee, whose MFA in nonfiction informs her work as a literary agent at Amazon Publishing. Lee’s passion for literature started with the Scholastic Book Fair, and eventually led her to Amazon’s Little A, on whose behalf she attends events at AAWW, Cave Canem, and Kundiman, among other places, as a way to recruit talented writers, particularly writers of color. She says:
I am interested in the beauty and transformational power of language and a good story and that’s what I gravitate towards. My list is predominantly writers of color mostly because I’m surrounded by wonderful communities of them… It’s a unique place to be in and it’s something I take very seriously.
