Interviews

we've interviewed lots of poets and those interviews will appear here once we get this website out of diapers

An Interview With Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000) was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She is also the author of Bellocq's Ophelia (2002) and Native Guard (2006), the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book is Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississipi Gulf Coast (2010). Trethewey holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. Her poems appeared in issue 5 of Smartish Pace.

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An Interview With Gaylord Brewer

Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and edits Poems & Plays. His most recent books are the comic novella Octavius the 1st (2008) and an eighth book of poetry, Give Over, Graymalkin (2011), both from Red Hen Press. He won the 2010 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest for Ghost (forthcoming), which includes the poems in this issue. Also in 2010, he taught poetry and playwriting in the Prague Summer Program. [Bio updated 2011]

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An Interview With Greg Williamson

Greg Williamson’s first book, The Silent Partner, won the 1995 Nicholas Roerich Prize and was published by Story Line Press. His second book, Errors in the Script (Overlook), was runner-up for the 2003 Poet’s Prize. In 2004, he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University and on November 7, 2002, he participated in the Smartish Pace Reading Series at the Contemporary Museum of Art in Baltimore. His poetry appears in Smartish Pace, Issues 7 and 12.

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An Interview With Patrick Ryan Frank

Patrick Ryan Frank’s first collection of poems, How the Losers Love What’s Lost, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in the spring of 2012. His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2008 (Virginia), North American Review, Poetry, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Cincinnati Review. Smartish Pace published his “Broken Bit” and “Singles’ Night at the Art Museum” in issue 17.

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An Interview With Aaron Poochigian

Aaron Poochigian recently completed Stung With Love: The Poems and Fragments of Sappho (Penguin, 2009). His poems and translations have appeared in The Chimaera, The Classical Journal, and Unsplendid. He is a D.L. Jordan Fellow at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. His poetry and translations appear in Smartish Pace, Issue 16 (2009).

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An Interview With Carol Frost

Carol Frost is the author of Love and Scorn (2000), I Will Say Beauty (2003), and The Queen’s Desertion (2006), all from TriQuarterly, and seven earlier books of poems. She has won four Pushcart Prizes and holds the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Chair in English at Rollins College. She founded the Catskill Poetry Workshop in 1988 and was its director until 2008. Her poetry appears in Smartish Pace, Issue 16 (2009).

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An Interview With Michael Chitwood

Michael Chitwood is a freelance writer and a lecturer at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of eight books of poetry including most recently From Whence (LSU, 2007) and Spill (Tupelo, 2007), a finalist for ForeWord magazine’s poetry book of the year, and winner of the 2008 Roanoke-Chowan Prize. His poetry appears in Smartish Pace, Issue 16 (2009).

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An Interview With Lynnell Edwards

Lynnell Edwards is the author of two collections of poetry: The Farmer’s Daughter (2003) and The Highwayman’s Wife (2007), both from Red Hen Press. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in Connecticut Review and New Madrid. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is an Associate Professor of English at Spalding University. [Bio updated 2011]

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An Interview With Lia Purpura

Lia Purpura is the author of The Brighter the Veil (Orchises, 1996), Stone Sky Lifting (Ohio State, 2000), and King Baby Poems (forthcoming, Alice James Books, 2008), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. Her collection of essays, On Looking (Sarabande, 2006), was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore. She read at the Whole Gallery, Baltimore, in the spring of 2008 for the release of Issue 15. Her work appears in Smartish Pace, Issue 15 (2008).

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An Interview With Gary Fincke

Gary Fincke’s latest collection of poems is Standing Around the Heart (Arkansas, 2005). His fourth collection of stories, Sorry I Worried You (Georgia, 2004) won the 2003 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction; Amp'd (Michigan State) his nonfiction account of his son's rock and roll life in two signed bands, was published in 2004. His poems appear in Smartish Pace, Issues 5, 8, 10, and 13. [Bio updated 2006]

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