News from Authors

Shara McCallum's latest collection Madwoman has won the 2018 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, awarded by the New England Poetry Club to any book of poems published in the last two years.

The New England Poetry Club (NEPC) was founded in 1915 by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, and Conrad Aiken and E.E. Cummings was a charter member.

Winners of Book Prizes receive prize money of $250, 250 NEPC Award book-cover stickers (gold or silver-foil stickers which identify the book as prize-winning) and an opportunity to read at the NEPC.

'In truth, Carnival’s proudest and most ingenious veterans, wielders of wire and whip and feather and bois, will all tell you: you must be in the mas to know it. You can be in the mas your whole life, and never know it in full,' writes Shivanee Ramlochan in this electrifying article for The Poetry School's 'How I Did It' series by Forward Prize-nominated writers. The series focuses on the process behind one of the poems in Shivanee's Felix Dennis First Collection-shortlisted title, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press).

Vahni Capildeo reflects on her Walking Cities walk with Dionne Brand in Toronto for the British Council.

Read the article at the British Council website.

Ricantations by Loretta Collins Klobah has been selected as a National Poetry Day recommendation for 2018.

The National Poetry Day Book Group also added its notes on the book for a readers' guide targeting book clubs, students and teachers. The book will also be distributed to book groups in association with NPD partner, The Reading Agency.

'A sense of the inner wildness, the “untameness” that is always beneath the surface of people and places, is what drives many of the poems. In the process of writing and editing Doe Songs, I tried to access that inner wildness and to learn to see it in everything, to acknowledge that the domestic and the wild, the gentle and the feral are bound together so closely in all living things and places,' says Danielle.

Read the interview in full.

'This poem is part of a manuscript that bears the same title, No Ruined Stone, and is an alternate account of history, based on the life of eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. The real Burns very nearly migrated to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation.

Carol Rumen's Poem of the Week in The Guardian this week is 'Spathes' by Loretta Collins Klobah.

Rumens notes that 'Spathes seems to bind together the various aspects of women’s creativity – sexuality, motherhood and artistic production – alongside the symbolism of political regeneration'.

Read the poem in full at The Guardian.

Check out the interview with Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné at Plum Season.

In an interview called ‘Sentient of how we are related’, Vahni Capildeo interviews Loretta Collins Klobah about Ricantations.