PUBLISHING NEW WOMEN POETS SINCE 1997
|
|
Save the Dates!
On Thursday, March 7, Hotchandani will be reading from, and in conversation about, her debut collection at Westfield State Universityin the Arno Maris Gallery from 4:00-5:30. This event is free and open
to the public.
Friday, March 8 is International Women's Day. In the afternoon, Hotchandani will be taking part in a poetry salon for students at the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. That evening, she will be reading with Perugia poet Gail Thomas and Perugia board members Jen Jabaily-Blackburn and Arya Samuelson at the Northampton Center for the Arts at 33 Hawley. The event brings together a variety of voices and perspectives on motherhood, and it is free and open to the public (and coincides with Arts Night Out in Northampton). See below for details, and check out our events page.
|
Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight
February 2024 Poet: Taylor Byas
South Side (I)
This is what teaches me love. Your streets, their wailing
for their dead. The way a siren becomes a mother
too. How my parents hold me like some frail thing
to their chests at night, how quick they are to cover
my ears when the block gets hot. The handshake half-hug
sacred enough to make a man feel whole
again. The shapeshifting, how what looks like a thug
in darkness softens into a boy in the gold-
glow of a bedside lamp. How we are all
somebody's grandbaby. Harold's Chicken steeped
in so much hot sauce, the nose runs, and the small
piece of bread too wet to hold, drowning beneath
the fries. Each of our brownstones, side by side—
so there's nowhere to run, nowhere for us to cry.
|
|
Board Member News
We're delighted to share that a new board member has joined the Perugia Press team. Welcome to Jen Jabaily-Blackburn, who began a two-year term this January. And much gratitude to outgoing board members Beverly Army Williams and Sharon Tracey, both longstanding board members who had a tremendous impact on our press. Learn more about our whole Board of Directors on our website.
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn:
Photo by Samm Smith
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s first book of poems, Girl in a Bear Suit, was selected by Christopher Citro as winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Prize and will be released in April 2024. Her recent work has appeared in, or is coming soon from, SIR, Arkansas International, Palette Poetry, Salamander, Fugue, Banshee, On the Seawall and Couplet Poetry, and her poems have twice been selected for Best New Poets. She is at work on a series of mixed-media blackout poems, hem, drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her family. She is an associate editor of Nine Syllables Press, housed at Smith College, where she is the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center.
|
Perugia Press at AWP 2024: Kansas City
Perugia Editor/Director Rebecca Olander with Perugia poets
Carolina Hotchandani, Abby E. Murray, Nancy K. Pearson,
and Catherine Anderson at AWP offsite at Habitat Contemporary
Perugia poet Rebecca Pelky at her book signing
Perugia poets Lynne Thompson and Carolina Hotchandani
with Editor/Director Rebecca Olander at the AWP Bookfair
|
|
* Perugia Poet News *
*
edited by Christal Ann Rice Cooper and Donna Biffar.
|
PERUGIA PRESS
PO Box 60364, Florence, MA 01062
|
|
|
|
|
