Grace Cavalieri Interviews Poetry Superstar Ocean Vuong
Grace Cavalieri kicks off the new year and a new season of "The Poet and The Poem" with an interview of poetry superstar Ocean Vuong. From her website:
"Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019) and forthcoming in 30 languages. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize."
"Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of "32 Essential Asian American Writers"? and has been profiled on NPR's "All Things Considered,"? PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker."
"Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Associate Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst."
ASP Author’s Gift Guide for Book Lovers (PART 2)
Gift guide part 2 features Mysteries, Travel Writing, and Books about Northern California.
ASP Authors’ Gift Guide for Book Lovers
Well, it’s that time of year again, when holiday gift lists are popping up all over. Here at ASP HQ, we’re particularly interested, of course, in gifts for book-lovers, and we’ve noticed a curious fact: No matter how diverse the sources of these lists, a few titles pop up again and again. Usually these are recently published, widely reviewed best-sellers. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, gift-givers might find themselves putting one more copy of the current hot mystery, or history, or memoir under a book-loving friend’s tree.
Featured Poetry: “Burial at Shanidar” by Elizabeth Hazen
This is no modern tradition, says Elizabeth Hazen. It is not only now that humans ornament their dead with flowers. “See,” she says in her rumination on tradition and humanity, Burial at Shanidar, “Even from a distance we dream of gardens where there should be stone.” And on Christmas especially, it is so wonderful to curl up with a book of poetry, even to read out-loud to one’s family, and bask in the ways we make words, just like the long winter days of dark, meaningful with light and tradition.