Recommended Contest: New Ohio Review

$1000 winnings aside, this contest is worth entering just for the chance of having David Wanczyk, who is one of the best lit mag editors out there, work with your writing. I’ve had two poems in NOR, and each time he has given my work such careful, keen attention that it was transformed far beyond what I’d initially imagined possible.

https://www.ohio.edu/nor/contest.htm

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The Heart Is a Muscular Organ

I’m happy to have this new poem in Tiferet, which is always gorgeously produced. The editors take such care with all the details big and small–from the cover art to the signature font. This issue also has a section of Malawian poems–I cannot wait to read them!

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Unbinding the Lyrics of Being

Many thanks to Christal Cooper for featuring my poem “Astral” in her blog series “Backstory of the Poem.” I really appreciate all the work she puts into this series. She dug up and included lots of fun photos of me that I didn’t even know I had, like the one below, as well as images of and by Leonora Carrington, who is the subject of the poem. I talked about how I wrote “Astral,” resisting unhealthy conformity, and how I used to jump on a trampoline in my dress when I got home from work. Also included are notes that didn’t make it into the final draft of the poem.

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https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/10/32-backstory-of-poem-astral-by-melissa.html

New York Times Photo and Poetry Collaboration

My poem, “Everyone in Me Is a Bird”, which was originally published for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, is now featured as part the New York Times’ “Being Women” project, an exciting poetry and photography collaboration.

This beautiful series, created by Kerri MacDonald and Morrigan McCarthy, began last summer and will run each year.

Other poets in the project: Tonya Ingram, Joy Harjo, Layli LongSoldier, Jennifer Chang and Nickole Brown.

Photographers: Ruth Anna Fremson, Cig Harvey, Maddie McGarvey, Annie Flanagan, Nydia Blas, Erika P. Rodrgz and Anjali Pinto.

The print edition is on the cover of the “National” section for Saturday, August 18, 2018.

Here’s the online edition:

And here’s the Instagram write-up:

 

 

 

 

 

I Was Ketchup On My Own Sleeve

I’m so happy to see a re-run of my poem “Integrating the Shadow” at New World Review. This poem was originally published in Redheaded Stepchild and later appeared in my collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, as well as in Verse Daily, Recours au Poème, and Ishaan Literary Review. I wrote this poem years ago, and I love to think of it out there now traveling around on its own.

http://www.neworldreview.com/vol_11No_77/poem-studdard.php

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The world drifts like a madness inside you

I’m very happy to have two poems on the myth of Icarus featured at the University of Leicester’s Creative Writing Blog for World Poetry Day!  These two poems have never been paired before, as “You Were a Bird; You Are the Sea” was collected in I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, while “Stomp the Ground” was written later and appeared in Southern Humanities Review. Happy World Poetry Day, everyone!

http://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/two-poems-by-melissa-studdard.html?m=1

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Blue Mountain Review Interview

I love the questions Charles Clifford Brooks III asked me for our Blue Mountain Review interview. I got to talk about how my grandmother took a 20 year Proust class, my mother instilled a love of storytelling in me, and my kid, Rosalind Williamson, is basically the literary love child of Franz Kafka and Gabriel García Márquez (not because of any credit to me, though I wish! ).