On Thursday, March 23, at 7:00 PM, the Creative Writing Program at ASU presents a reading by Bojan Louis and Sara Sams.
Bojan Louis is Diné of the Naakai dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. He’s written a variety of poetry and fiction, published in Alaska Quarterly, Ecotone, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He’s published two books: Sinking Bell: Stories and Currents, which received an American Book Award. To learn more, visit his website.
Sara Sams is a writer and translator from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She’s written a variety of poetry and nonfiction in Blackbird, Now and Then, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She’s published Atom City, her fist book of poems. To learn more, visit her website.
Read Bojan Louis’s interview in Issue 20 of Superstition Review.
Sara Sams advised on and helped to create Issue 22 of Superstition Review.
This event is free and open to the public! To learn more and register, go here.
Do you have a great writing workspace? Share a picture of the space that allows your creativity to flow to win an exclusive Superstition Review mug! Messy, orderly, or out of the ordinary workspaces are all invited to apply. To do so:
The contest will run from March 25th to April 3rd. We look forward to seeing all of the creative workspaces where masterpieces are born! You can view entries from our previous Workspace contests here.
Jane Satterfield’s poetry collection The Badass Brontës, published by Diode Editions, explores the lives and legacy of the Brontë sisters, some of the most iconic literary figures of the 19th century Jane’s poetry illuminates the traumas, decisions, and aspirations of Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë.
Jane Satterfield’s beautiful new collection The Badass Brontës reimagines the world of the Brontë sisters. With a range of forms including ekphrasis, letters, a cento, a sestina and even a quiz—“Which Brontë sister are you?”—Satterfield’s poems are both daring and inventive. The poems investigate the Brontës’ vivid world of imagination and envision the sisters’ lives in our present moment, during the pandemic lockdown and the climate crisis. I love The Badass Brontës for its lyric grace but also for its boldness and wit. As Satterfield writes in the poem “Volumes,” “A book’s an invitation, / excoriation, sustenance, pilgrimage…” and this exhilarating book is all of this and more.
—Nicole Cooley, author of Girl after Girl after Girl
In 2022, Jane wrote about her interest in the history of the sisters as their images filtered through pop culture in a PopPoetry article. It’s a wonderful look into her enthusiasm for writing about literary influences throughout history.
“Would you / say the here & now is a horizon / to eternity?” asks the poet of Emily Brontë in the proem that introduces Jane Satterfield’s remarkable new collection. With consummate empathy, the poems of The Badass Brontës seek nothing less than to interfuse historical, personal, and artistic horizons, and do so with such formal and tonal vibrancy they accomplish something close to a co-presence of the Brontës’ haunting and haunted world and our own fraught and frangible one. In Satterfield’s work, the voices of these figures emerge as from a proverbial mind-meld with the poet’s, such that every detail feels conjured alive, awake, so each becomes, like all of us, “one bright strand / in the story of time & / vanishing.”
Daniel Tobin, author of Blood Labors
You can pre-order The Badass Brontëshere. Visit Jane’s website here. Her nonfiction piece “Mother Tongue” appeared in issue 17.
Deborah Bogen | Speak Now This Charm (2022, Jacar Press)
In her latest poetry collection Speak Now This Charm, published by Jacar Press, Deborah Bogen explores grief, trauma, and vulnerability with concise and moving poems. Her collection is exquisitely succinct and profoundly gorgeous, with her poems ranging from one to three paragraphs, none longer than a page. Each word she chooses is necessary and stunning, and each poem stacks on top of the other like building blocks, creating a vast tapestry of experiences and states of mind that we rarely go looking for. In her poem “About Anesthesia,” Bogen finishes with the line, “That’s the beauty of the near- / death experience. You snuggle right up to / zero, but you’re not afraid.”
Ultimately, Bogen’s collection is a deep contemplation on how death impacts each and every one of us—whether it’s friends or family members’ deaths or our own. Her poems provide a strange sort of comfort for this inevitability of life: “Tonight, I will surrender this busy pulse and / accept their stagnant blood as mine.”
I loved reading “In Case of Sudden Free Fall,” Deborah Bogen’s beautiful and remarkable oneiric prose poem collection. A delicious gem, it takes the reader on a soulful and transformative journey. Under Bogen’s expert guidance, we travel from enchantment to melancholy, to surprising encounters with literary and artistic figures, to loss and death, and back to wonder. I’ll keep revisiting this collection time and again.
Hélèna Cardona, praise for In case of sudden free fall
Deborah Bogen is a poet and novelist. She has four prize-winning collections of poetry, including In Case of Sudden Free Fall, Let Me Open You a Swan, and Landscape with Silos.Speak Now This Charm is Bogen’s attempt to create her own form—the box poem—while including the box as a central image in the work. When she’s not making poems, she writes songs, plays guitar, sings in the family band and tries (with an ardent band of local activists) to elect ethical candidates locally and nationally. Bogen invites email responses at dbbogen@aol.com. To learn more, visit her website.
Deborah Bogen’s poetry appeared in Issue 12 and Issue 21 of Superstition Review.
Richard Shelton, 1970 | Photo credit: LaVerne Harrell Clark
On Saturday, March 4th, from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm, the University of Arizona Poetry Center will be celebrating the life of Richard Shelton, renowned poet, memoirist, and activist. He wrote 11 books of poetry and established a writers workshop in the Arizona State Prison at Florence. He was also an emeritus Regents Professor of Creative Writing and a founding faculty member of the University of Arizona MFA Program in Creative Writing.
This event is free, open to the public, and available online. To learn more, go here.
An interview with Richard Shelton appeared in Issue 10 of Superstition Review.
Trained in health communications, mixed-methods research methods and policy analysis, I am skilled in conducting research, managing high-impact projects, and communicating with stakeholders.
Alyssa Lindsey, Linkedin
Congratulations, Alyssa! We are so proud of you!
Connect with Alyssa to follow her journey on her LinkedIn profile. Alyssa was our Poetry Editor for issue 22 and issue 23.
On Friday, March 3rd, at 6:30 pm, join best-selling authors Andrew Greer and Amanda Ward at the Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix. There, they will be discussing their creative journeys, their writing, and their friendship. This event is free and open to the public. To learn more and register, go here.
Amanda Eyre Ward lives in Austin, TX. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Sleep Toward Heaven, How to Be Lost, Love Stories in This Town, Forgive Me, Close Your Eyes, The Same Sky, The Nearness of You, The Jetsetters, and The Lifeguards. An interview with Amanda Eyre Ward was published in Issue 7 of Superstition Review.
Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven works of fiction, including The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Lessis Lost. He lives in San Fransisco and Milan. An interview with Andrew Sean Greer was published in Issue 15 of Superstition Review.
Nothing Follows (Texas Tech University Press, 2023)
In Nothing Follows, published by Texas Tech University Press, Lan P. Duong explores the girlhood of Vietnamese refugees through government documents, memoir, and poetry. Their sanctuary in the US, however, is questionable in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and they face racism, objectification, and violence.
Lan P. Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her research areas include Feminist Film Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Asian American Cinema, and Genre Studies. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Temple University Press, 2012). Duong’s creative works have appeared in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, Bold Words: Asian American Writing to Span the Centuries, Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, and Crab Orchard Review. She lives in Pasadena, California. To learn more, visit her website.
Lan P. Duong’s debut collection is forthcoming April, 2023, but you can pre-order it here.
Nothing Follows is part of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network Series, an on-going project to “foster dialogue and understanding by supporting contemporary Vietnamese and Southeast Asian authors whose rich and complex stories need to be championed and heard. It supports a range of works including novels, memoirs, poetry, anthologies, and graphic novels.” DVAN‘s first book in the series is Abbigail Rosewood’s Constellations of Eve.
Briefly Inhabit A Fictional World, 2022, Latex paint and resin on wood panel, 18x18x2.5 inches | Jenny Wu
We are ecstatic about Jenny Wu’s solo exhibition Ai Yo! at Morton Fine Art in Washington, D.C. featuring her sculptural paintings. Wu’s work combines latex paint and resin on wood panels to explore “tactility, in-betweenness, embodiedness, and construction,” an approach she has been refining for nearly a decade.
To view more pieces from Ai Yo! and read about Wu’s process for creating her artwork, visit the exhibition page. The exhibition opened on February 8th and is viewable until March 8th. Gallery hours are appointment only. Information about pricing and appointments for in-person viewing is available by contacting info@mortonfineart.com
Jenny Wu’s art and upcoming exhibitions can be found on her website. Her sculptural paintings were featured in issue 30.
Join the Young Authors’ Studio’s Writing Retreat this Saturday, February 18, at ASU’s Polytechnic Campus! This event is free and open to everyone of all ages. Beginning at 9:30am, Dr. Wendy Williams will lead attendees through nine YA books to spark their creativity. Then, attendees will have the option of choosing three breakout writing sessions from 10:30am to 12:00pm. After, there’s lunch and spoken-word poetry.
This event has free parking, free pizza, and b00k giveaways! To learn more and register, go here.
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