Four New Poems Out (Hobart)

I have four new poems in Hobart. You can check them out here. Thank you to Elizabeth Ellen.

Playsuit Time

Poem Forthcoming in The Orange Room Review

I found out this evening that a new poem of mine was accepted by The Orange Room Review. I'm excited.

The poem will be in the June issue. It's called "Breaking Up with Marc Summers."

Seriously.

My Hobart poems will be out next week.

I feel good and summery.

New Poem Out (Atticus Review)

I have a poem in this week's issue of Atticus Review. You can check it out here. Editor Joseph Gross had some nice things to say about the poem which you can read here. Thank you to all the Atticus Review editors. Don't forget to check out Atticus Books as well. Atticus Review also accepted another poem of mine and I'll let you know when that one comes out.

I found out today that a poem of mine was a winner in Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts' Academy of American Poets Prize competition judged by Shane McCrae. Recently another poem of mine received a prize in the Sam Ella Dukes Memorial poetry contest for grad students at the University of Akron. Those two poems along with two other poems are forthcoming in Hobart and will be out sometime in May. Speaking of Hobart, be sure to check out Jacob Euteneuer's recent piece.

Since my book is coming out before 2014 and I don't graduate until May 2014, my thesis is going to be a new manuscript. I'm really excited about the book and the new manuscript.

I have one more week of teaching and classes until finals week... I am ready for this semester to be over.

4/16/13

I have short hair now! Well... Short for me, at least. It feels really good.

Poem Forthcoming in The Alarmist Magazine

Earlier today I had a new poem accepted by The Alarmist. I'll let you know when the new issue comes out! Issues of The Alarmist can be ordered online or you can purchase a copy at these stores as well as these stores.

I'm on a panel about publishing that will be happening on April 19th at 3:00 pm at Quaker Square Hotel (Plaza A & B) in Akron, Ohio.

Austin, Texas

Issue Three Release (Dressing Room Poetry Journal)

Issue Three of Dressing Room Poetry Journal is out now.

The issue features poems by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Anne Barngrover & Avni Vyas, Brian Beatty, Richard Carr, Anne Champion, Ha Kiet Chau, Lisa J. Cihlar, Howie Good, Genevieve Jencson, KJ, Krystal Languell, Robert Lietz, Kellie Nadler, Krysia Orlowski, Danielle Pafunda, Frederick Pollack, Sarah Sarai, Katie Jean Shinkle, Erin Virgil, Megan Volpert, and Valerie Wetlaufer.

You can check it out here.

3/15/13

Busy day. Still more to do. I even had to break out my drugstore reading glasses. Ready for vacation.

New Poem Out (Wicked Alice)

I have a new poem in Wicked Alice. You can check it out here.

SAGES Interview

I was interviewed by SAGES: The Society of Akron Graduate English Scholars. You can check it out here.

I'm excited about what's coming up in Issue Three of Dressing Room Poetry Journal. More soon...

Four Poems Forthcoming in Hobart

Today I had four very new poems accepted for publication by Hobart. They are scheduled to be out in May. I'm so excited!

Be sure to check out a poem by Mary Biddinger on Verse Daily tomorrow.

NewPages

I'm in NewPages in a review of Rufous City Review. You can check it out here. You can read all the recent reviews here. 

I am going to be up all night to get all of my work (writing, reading, grading, etc.) done... Oh my goodness...

Poetry Forthcoming in Wicked Alice

Got an acceptance today from Wicked Alice!

Busy, busy day...

I'm ready for late March...Austin, Texas...sunshine...

What I'm Reading Right Now

Dressing Room Poetry Journal: Issue Two Release

Issue Two of Dressing Room Poetry Journal is out now. 

The issue features poems by Paul David Adkins, J. Bradley, Mary Stone Dockery, Samantha Duncan, Howie Good, Chelsey Harris, Mark Jackley, Ben Nardolilli, Kenneth Pobo, Emily Strauss, Meghan Tutolo, and J. Michael Wahlgren.

You can check it out here.

1/21/13

Austin Smith Interview

An Interview with Austin Smith
The Next Big Thing Interview Series
Tagged by Meg Johnson

What is the working title of the book?

The title, which may or may not be working, is Almanac. (Thank you Mike Theune for suggesting this be the title years ago).

Where did the idea come from for the book?

My Dad is a poet and for thirty years he was a dairy farmer. When my brothers and I were little we would find ourselves some evenings at the Freeport Art Museum in Freeport, Illinois, amongst those earnest but mortally flawed works of art produced by small-town painters entering their dotage, and suddenly after the hush that precedes all poetry readings and wakes our father would begin reading poems and the crippled up farmers who came to hear him would try to turn the tiny dials of their hearing aids up with their crushed fingernails and lean forward better to hear him speak of and for their lives. So I guess the idea for the book came from witnessing all that where I sat squirming on the floor wondering if there were cookies in the backroom along with the mummy on loan from a museum in Chicago.

What genre does your book fall under?

It falls, I suppose, under the wheels of the runaway train of poetry with the sad resignation of Anna Karenina, though in the moment before it pitches itself forward, it does, in the briefest glance, take in the long twinned gleaming vanishment of the rails and imagines a life lived up in one of those mountain towns, where the train is headed, a life simple and good as bread, but by then has leaned too far forward and indeed has passed the point of no return.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I would never allow any actor to mar the holiness of the lives of my characters, which, like all lives, are necessarily mysterious and impossible to know. In fact, I feel a real sense of guilt at having attempted to write about them, much less act like them. I like to think my guilt is of the sort James Agee felt in Alabama in 1936 but then I’m desperate to believe that James Agee would enjoy drinking whiskey with me in New York in one of the saloons on 5^th Avenue in 1935, when he’s on the very verge of writing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and having difficulty swallowing he’s so excited and scared, so I suppose I should accept that I may be a bit prejudiced in this regard.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Oh God, this question is the reason why our literary culture is asphyxiating on the baby blanket of itself.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Thirty years and thirty-seven days, approximately.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

James Agee, William Maxwell, Larry Levis, Norman Maclean, Marcel Proust, Loren Eiseley, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, Ernest Hemingway, Lorine Niedecker, Thomas Merton, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Robert Bly, Emily Dickinson, Tomas Transtromer, Nick Drake, Archie Lieberman, William Faulkner, John Keats, Andrew Wyeth, Emmet Gowin, Federico Garcia Lorca, Joseph Campbell, John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, Brother Antoninus, Luke, Matthew, John, Mark, Paul, St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Therese of Lisieux, Bill Shakespeare, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, W.S. Merwin, Basho, Issa, Buson, Thomas James, Breece D'J Pancake, Frank Stanford, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Dick Cheney, Chelsey Weber-Smith, Greg Solano, Lee Clay Johnson, Janaki Jagannath, Alex Miller, Tree Music, Infinity Kid, Dori Stone, Ethan Hughes, Quill Chase, D.A. Powell, Mike Theune, Brooks Johnson, Kent Johnson, Araki Yasusada, Lucien Stryk, Michael Mott, Fyodor Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, Julio de Luna, William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Bon Iver, Townes Van Zandt, my mother, my father, my grandfathers, my grandmothers, my brothers, Merwin the Cat, Nova the Dog, Blanchard the Horse, Smokey the Horse, Lady the (oldest) Horse (in Stephenson County), Les the Prophet, Barbie the Hired Woman, Eric the Hired Man, The Foxhole Tree, The Three Trees, The Mote Tree, Old Deadline, The Tree of Thorns, The Raccoon Tree, The Chain Tree, the light of northwestern Illinois in autumn, lilacs, porches, fireflies, roads named after dead farmers, beer, gravel, drowned singers, tire swings, football games, scythes, oats, Queen Anne's Lace, spit bugs, cicadas, the Pecatonica River, the Mississippi River, the Pacific Ocean, Ducks Misery, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, a man I met on an Indian Reservation in South Dakota who asked me if I'd ever buried a brother, the one-armed man who stopped me from walking out in front of a bus in India, a truck driver named Joy who gave me a ride clear to the Artic Ocean, etc...

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I’m hoping that this painting will be the cover:

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The book will be published by Princeton University Press as part of the Princeton Contemporary Poets Series.

My tagged writers for next week are:

Hugh Martin

Julio de Luna

Kent Johnson

Kai Roald Carlson-Wee

The Next Big Thing

The amazing Mary Biddinger tagged me for The Next Big Thing interview series. Thank you Mary! Here are my responses about my book which is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review Press.

What is the working title of the book?

Inappropriate Sleepover

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I didn’t realize I had written a book until it was pointed out to me by mentors and friends. I had been publishing poems in various magazines and journals since late spring 2009. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking about a full length collection in the future, but my focus was on writing and publishing a few poems at a time. I feel that writing and publishing is like performing on the page and I’ve really enjoyed having my work in print and online publications. I guess a book is like a one-woman show which is exciting.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

A quirky twenty-something brunette actress would be needed as well as some actors and actresses of different ages.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

A coming-of-age poetry collection where the speaker encounters and overthrows a variety of societal barriers.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

The poems were written over the past four years. A couple of poems go back as far as fall 2008. Many of the poems were written in the last year and a half.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The material in the book came from my own life and imagination, but I was influenced by many artists including Chelsey Minnis, Frank O’Hara, Gilda Radner, Denise Duhamel, Matthew Guenette, Robbie Q. Telfer, and Bob Fosse.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Some of the poems are funny, or so I’ve been told. Some of the poems play with conventions of femininity. The clash of innocence and experience comes up, and ultimately these coexist within the speaker. Some of the poems are fairly racy, I suppose.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The book is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review Press. The editor of the press is C.J. Sage.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:

Anne Champion

Amy Lawless

Marjorie Manwaring

Alissa Nutting

Tenaya Darlington (Tenaya is currently out of the country and will post her interview when she can. Her forthcoming book comes out in May.)

Austin Smith (Interview site TBA.)

2013!

It's 2013! I changed my hair! My shirt has bows on it! I've had too much diet pepsi!

New Poem Out (Rufous City Review)

I have a poem in the newest issue (Issue 9) of Rufous City Review. You can check out the issue here.

Happy New Year!

Book Forthcoming from The National Poetry Review Press

I'm excited to announce that my first full length poetry collection is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review Press.

I am honored that CJ Sage selected the book for publication.

More details later...

Issue One Release (Dressing Room Poetry Journal)

The first issue of Dressing Room Poetry Journal is out now. You can check it out here.

Submissions are now open for Issue Two.

J'ai Deux Amours

I love this interview of Lar Lubovitch. It makes me think of this song.

Yes, news coming soon...

New Poem Out (Smoking Glue Gun)

I have a poem in the new issue of Smoking Glue Gun. You can check it out here.

Today I got a haircut...

Tomorrow I fly to Minneapolis for a reading I'm giving on Sunday.

News coming... Will blog more soon.

New Poem Published in The Destroyer

I have a poem in the new issue of The Destroyer.

There are also digital broadsides available that can be downloaded and used as computer desktop backgrounds, etc.

Come On, December

Punchnel's is publishing an anthology that is scheduled to be released before the holidays. It will be available as a paperback book and as an e-book. The editors chose fifty pieces originally published in the magazine including one of my poems. 

I am now editing Dressing Room Poetry Journal, a new online poetry magazine. The first issue will be out before 2013 and will feature poems by Mary Biddinger, Susana H. Case, Tenaya Darlington, Terry Godbey, Amy Lawless, M.P. Powers, Jay Robinson, and xTx. I'm really excited about the poems that will be in the upcoming issue.

I have a new website which you can see here. I will keep posting updates on this blog as well. 

I've been having reoccurring dreams lately about various things including Nutcracker parts I performed as a teenager. Is it time for Christmas yet? Anyway...

More/other news coming soon/soonish. 

Election Day 2012

Poems Forthcoming in Underground Voices

Today I found out I had two poems accepted by Underground Voices. The poems will be in a print anthology scheduled to be released in November 2013. I'm excited.

I have another project I'm working on that I will blog more about soon.

It's been raining in Akron every day this week. It's been really cold here too. My space heater is currently cranked up to its highest setting.

Where Have You Bean? Poetry & Fiction Reading (Minneapolis)

Reading in Minneapolis

I'll be reading in a poetry and fiction reading in Minneapolis on December 2nd. More details soon. I'm looking forward to it. I haven't been there in several years, but I used to frequently have dance performances in Minneapolis.

Things have been so busy lately. I feel a little like this.

Rubbertop Review Release (Issue Four)

New Poem in Gesture Zine

I have a poem in the newest issue of Gesture Zine. You can check it out here.

Poems Forthcoming in Rufous City Review and Smoking Glue Gun

This afternoon I had a poem accepted by Rufous City Review and shortly after that another poem was accepted by Smoking Glue Gun.

I am very tired, but very excited!

Poem Forthcoming in Gesture Zine

I just found out I had a poem accepted for publication by the online magazine Gesture Zine. The newest issue of Gesture is scheduled to be released very soon. I'm excited!

Upcoming Poetry Reading in Akron

I will be doing some poetry outreach on Monday, October 15th. I will be reading at North High School in Akron for Teen Read Week.

Poems Forthcoming in Atticus Review

I found out earlier today that I had two poems accepted for publication by Atticus Review. I'm very excited!

This week has been better than I had expected it to be. Feelin' the love.

Chilling

New Poem Published in Punchnel's

I have a new poem out in Punchnel's. You can check it out here.

Hello autumn.

New Poems Out (Stone Highway Review)

I have two new poems in the latest issue (Issue 2.1) of Stone Highway Review. The issue is available online for free and can also be purchased as a print edition.

I head back to Akron this weekend...

Midwestern Gothic Interview

I was interviewed by Midwestern Gothic. You can check it out here.