Plus: Poetry vs. MIT
Over the transom.
1. Poetry Nominated.
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is proud to announce that the magazine is a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the category of “General Excellence, Print.” Poetry shares distinguished company with fellow finalists MIT Technology Review, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and The Paris Review in the group classified as “Literary, Political and Professional Magazines.”
Congratulations to Poetry, but the oddity of that grouping illustrates the futility (and incompetence) of most awards-giving.
2. Chicago Folk Laureate.
Edward Hirsch, poet, critic and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, will speak at a Society of Midland Authors event on Tuesday, April 16, at the Cliff Dwellers Club in Chicago. Booklist senior editor Donna Seaman will introduce Hirsch.
A native of Chicago, Hirsch has published several books of poems since 1981, including 1986’s Wild Gratitude, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book is The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, published in 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf. His prose books include the 1999 best-seller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry and Poet’s Choice, a 2007 collection of essay-letters from the Washington Post Book World.
“It takes a brave poet to follow Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton into the abyss,” poet Dana Goodyear wrote about Hirsch in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. “Hirsch’s poems (are) compassionate, reverential, sometimes relievingly ruthless.” Hirsch, who has a doctorate in folklore, has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Hirsch will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 16, at the newly renovated Cliff Dwellers Club, 200 S. Michigan Ave., 22nd floor. A social hour, with complimentary snacks and a cash bar, begins at 6 p.m. Reservations are not required. Admission is free, but the Society will accept donations to defray the cost of programs.
3. Feeling Fabulist.
Kevin Brockmeier, an American writer of fantasy and fiction and one of the nation’s best known practitioners of fabulist fiction, will read from his work at 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 10 in Roosevelt University’s Gage Galley, 18 S. Michigan Ave.
Brockmeier is an Arkansas writer who has published three novels, The Truth About Celia, The Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination; two story collections including Things that Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; and children’s books including City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery.
A three-time winner of the O’Henry Prize and recipient of the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, the Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, several Booker Worth Literary prizes and the Porter Fund Literary Prize, Brockmeier is widely acclaimed for his vivid imagination and masterful use of figurative language in stories combining reality with fantasy.
His work has been translated into 17 languages and his stories have appeared in such venues as The New Yorker, McSweeney’s Zoetrope, Tin House, The Oxford American, The Georgia Review, The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and New Stories from the South.
Brockmeier also was recently named one of the nation’s Best Young American Novelists by Granta magazine.
The reading is part of the Creative Writing Program’s Gage Gallery Reading Series, which is free and open to the public. Doors open at 4:30 p.m. Light refreshments will be served.
4. Never Trust A Thin Viking.
Author Eric Dregni will be in Chicago for events for two of his books, Never Trust a Thin Cook and Other Lessons from Italy’s Culinary Capital and Vikings in the Attic: In Search of Nordic America.
Events for Vikings in the Attic:
Saturday April 13th
1:00 PM
Minnekirken Norwegian Lutheran Church
2614 N Kedzie Ave.
Sunday, April 14th
1:00 PM
Svithoid Sons of Norway Lodge
Svithoid Hall
5516 Lawrence Avenue
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Event for Never Trust a Thin Cook:
Monday, April 15th
6:00 PM
Italian Cultural Institute
500 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1450
5. Chicago Group Sends Female Inmates Books.
While there are several projects that send books to prisons generally, this is one of only two in the country that cater specifically to female inmates and to transgender women in male prisons, who sometimes have unique requests.
Posted on April 3, 2013