P&W! Folio! Road trip! Many exclamation points!

Some months ago, Poets & Writers interviewed me in celebration of its 40th Anniversary; apparently, I am their featured clip of the week. Happy Birthday, P&W! You just get prettier with each passing year. Here I am, waxing, um, poetic-ish. 

I try not to be vain about these things, but why does YouTube always choose a screen grab of me with my eyes closed? 


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Today I get on the road--first to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I will spend a couple of days as the visiting writer at Charlotte Country Day School. After that is is on to Oxford, MS, where I'll daytrip for a reading at the Memphis Davis-Kidd on Tuesday, October 26, and record a small guest spot for Thacker Mountain Radio at Square Books on Thursday, October 28. Pause for small-town Halloween interlude, ideally involving vast quantities of pumpkin cremes (like candy corn, but so much better). Then I'll stop off on my way back to DC for classroom visits at the University of Virginia and a high school in Woodstock, Virginia. Five gigs. Two weeks. Lord, I hope I packed enough clean laundry.


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What I am listening to right this very second: Peggy Lee's "Why Don't You Do Right?"

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Oh, and before I forget--start readying your drafts. FOLIO has a literary contest coming up, and the judge is no other than the fabulous Naomi Shihab Nye. I edited FOLIO eons ago, while an MFA student at American University. I'm proud to note that their pages still use the fonts Paulette and I picked out. Anyway, send in! The details:


2011 FOLIO POETRY CONTEST


FOLIO, a literary journal at American University, is celebrating its MFA program’s 30th anniversary with a poetry contest that will be judged by award-winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye (author of You and Yours, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, among others).


Entries must be postmarked by Monday, February 14, 2011.


Please observe the following:


• Submit up to 3 poems, a brief cover letter containing your name, address, email address, and day and evening telephone numbers, as well as a list of the submitted poem in the order in which they appear. Do not include your name on the poems themselves, only on the cover sheet;


• You are welcome to submit more than once, provided you do so under separate covers, and pay a reading fee per entry (up to three poems);


• Send with your submission a $10 reading fee (check or money order and include a SASE to Folio, Department of Literature, Attn: Poetry Contest, American University, Washington, D.C. 20016;


• Current AU students are not eligible. Please do not send previously published poems.


Every contestant’s reading fee gets him or her a copy of the issue in which the winning entries will be published. All contest entries will also be considered for publication in FOLIO.


1st Prize: $500 / Honorable Mention: $100 / Honorable Mention: $100


It's a great magazine, and a great opportunity to have your work read by a contemporary poetry goddess. Please spread the word~