R&R

New York City was lovely but oof, oof, the return trip was brutal! I left my friend Carly's Brooklyn apartment at noon. Once you added up the walk to the subway, the transit to Penn Station, boarding the BoltBus, holiday/rush hour traffic, metro-ing from the DC bus drop, and walking home from Cleveland Park...well, it was eight hours later. All the while hauling a suitcase that has no rolling wheels. Time for a little R&R.

But one of the advantages of sticking around an extra day to hear my friend Erika Meitner read at louderARTS's Bar 13--and she did a fantastic job--was that I also got to have an marketing session with the folks at Crown. There will be news on the DKTBG front soon, including the unveiling of the cover and a book trailer. In the meantime I've got 210 pages of copyediting to do between now and Monday.

Congratulations are in order on two fronts:

1) The amazing DC foodwriter Tim Carman (longtime reporter and "Young and Hungry" blogger for the Washington City Paper) is making the jump to the Washington Post. Yay, Tim! Some of my favorite essays of his include a tribute to the handcraft of dim sum, an investigation on how not to hire a chef, and an ode to intelligent drinking.

...also, of course, there's a lot of buzz in the poetry world right now over the announcement of the latest round of NEA Fellowship winners. I’m particularly thrilled to see Jericho Brown, Blas Falconer, Anna Journey, Joshua Mehigan, Thorpe Moeckel, and Allison Titus make the cut.

Are you feeling generous because of the holidays? Check out Todd Boss's MOTION POEMS project ("Where big poems meet the big screen"), here, and consider contributing to the cause of supporting artists and videographers in their creative work devoted to the interpretation/promotion of poetry.

& Have a fabulous Thanksgiving! My cousins will be frying not one but two turkeys--one Cajun-spiced and one, er, classic. As classic as a deep-fried bird can be.