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Mycocosmic cover & pre-order link!!!
I am SO EXCITED to reveal the cover to my sixth poetry book, MYCOCOSMIC! It’s also available for preorder from Tupelo Press at this link, and it officially marches forth on March 4th, 2025. The cover art is from a series entitled “Radiant Void” by Pearl Cowan, whose other works you can also see on…
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Impossible, improbable, and infinitely full
It’ll be Shenandoah‘s 75th anniversary in 2025 and celebrations are beginning. First up, an exhibition at W&L’s Leyburn Library curated by Editor in Chief Beth Staples and students. It features precious and startling items from the archive. For example, poems and letters from Langston Hughes and E. E. Cummings are on display, and, more unusually,…
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Small college English, ’90s style
I just began a new term with thirty years at W&L in the rearview mirror. I looked up 1994: aside from the leaders and wars I remembered, Wikipedia reminded me that was the year Munch’s The Scream was stolen, Kurt Cobain died, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president, the Chunnel opened, and Pulp Fiction…
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Hope, ambition, and other tricky green things
“Let him who is without my poems get assassinated!” Walt Whitman wrote, when the self-published 1855 Leaves of Grass didn’t make much of a splash, despite the three glowing reviews Whitman himself wrote and published anonymously. I’m reading him for a 4-week, all-remote Whitman and Dickinson seminar I’m teaching right now, and bonus: it helps…
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Pleased as punch (with recipe)
Maybe I need to blog about poetic self-doubt more often. As soon as I did, my luck seemed to shift under my feet. I had been doing math some of you have surely done, too: I’ve been showing the ms around for a while now. What if this poetry collection I thought was so great doesn’t…
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Coniferous forests of hard thinking
When your child takes a summer internship in Siberia, you think, hmm, THAT’s a long way for a teenager to go to escape parental interference. Maybe you made the normal adolescent struggle for independence a little difficult? Parents can follow their kids now through multiple technologies and social media platforms, and I do. With trust,…
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Oh, mother
Writing is a confidence game, and while generally I can play it with the necessary brio, occasionally I drop all the cards. In many ways, I’m having a great spring. I love this new essay on Radioland by Athena Kildegaard in Bloom. I’m happily tinkering with fall syllabi, but I still have a few months before…
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LESLEY WHEELER 