May your holidays be warm and loving, with many hours of reading joy!
UPCOMING EVENTS
DECEMBER 10: Jean Huets (with a whole bunch of other writers) will be signing The Bones You Have Cast Down at indie bookseller Chop Suey Books Brew Ho-ho, Sunday, Dec 10, 2-5 pm, Hardywood Park Craft Brewery, RVA. more info
FORTHCOMING BOOKS
I’m very happy to announce that Circling Rivers will publish a reprint of Robert Hazel’s poetry collection, Who Touches This, in Fall 2018.
Like many of Robert’s former students, I revered Robert as mentor and teacher. That devotion would suffice to justify the reprint. But Robert’s poems live: they are just as immediate, just as true, just as relevant as they were when Robert wrote them. As Wendell Berry, one of Robert’s more illustrious students, said: “Robert Hazel has written poems that stand, not only apart, but high and alone.”
Here’s a taste, from “Queens Plaza”:
I saw a thin girl
at a bank of white candles
whose flames were the leaves
of her burnt childhood
and their smoke was the scented
cry of her dreams
in a chapel of plaster hands….
Also forthcoming:
The response to the interactive version of With Walt Whitman: Himself has encouraged us to issue a print edition, in Fall 2018.
CIRCLING RIVERS AUTHORS
“A large group of students, fellow faculty, and more gathered in the Widener University Art Gallery on October 5 to hear Kenneth Pobo read from this book of ekphrastic poetry, Loplop in a Red City…. By the time Pobo got to the poem ‘Georgia O’Keefe’s Flowers,’ his audience was so engrossed that most of us felt we were indeed collapsing into this magnificent flower that he described.” Read more
Jean Huets’ interview with Charlotte Mandell, translator of Booker Prize finalist Compass, by Mathias Enard, is at The Millions. Read it
FRIENDS OF CIRCLING RIVERS
Dale M. Brumfield’s Virginia State Penitentiary: A Notorious History is available from The History Press. Dale is the Field Director for Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, as well as a digital archaeologist, journalist and author of eight books. Visit Dale
DECEMBER 1-2: Marta Elva, author of American Tumbleweeds, will be featured at the 2017 Beacon of HOPE’s Holiday House, Dec 1-2, 5:30-10 pm, at the Historic Tarpon Lodge, Pine Island, FL. Beacon of HOPE helps people live lives of dignity by building bridges between people in need and people with a desire to serve. more info
DECEMBER 9: Visit Marta Elva at the Lee County (FL) Libraries Book Fair, Saturday, Dec 9, 1-4 pm, where she’ll be signing American Tumbleweeds to benefit the Summer Reading Program, a free, six-week program for children aged 0-18 at all Lee County Libraries. As part of the program, every child gets to choose a free new book for their own. more info