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On Wednesday, October 18th, the Maryland State Arts Council announced that Grace Cavalieri’s tenure as Poet Laureate of Maryland had ended. Cavalieri served as Poet Laureate since 2018. Throughout her literary career, she has authored 26 books and chapbooks of poetry, written 26 produced plays, and constantly uplifted the voices of other poets. In her role as Poet Laureate, Cavalieri embarked upon projects like Teens Seen and Heard, which offered monthly poetry workshops to teenagers in Howard County, Prince George’s County, and Salisbury, Maryland. Her radio program The Poet and the Poem has … [Read more...]

Writing can be a labor of love. Finishing a piece that you’re proud of feels like a Herculean accomplishment at times. Taking the next step and starting a whole new process by sending that work to literary journals can be just as intense and exhausting. As a writer who has been on both ends of the Submittable scene—sending off poems in hopes of publication, as well as screening submissions to either accept or reject—I try to always keep these tips in mind. While every publication is different, and every writer has their own approach, it never hurts to circle back to the basics. 1. A cover … [Read more...]

On June 16th, following the release of Junk Shop Window: Essays on Myth, Life, and Literature, James J. Patterson gave a reading at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland—“the center of the universe,” according to Patterson—alongside novelist Aaron Hamburger, author of Hotel Cuba. In a discussion moderated by Zach Powers, these writers talked about their inspirations, their writing methods, and their upcoming projects. In conversation, Patterson and Hamburger recalled the origins of their latest books. “To warm up, I would work on essays,” Patterson said, describing how the essays in … [Read more...]

By Eylie Sasajima To celebrate the upcoming release of Junk Shop Window: Essays on Myth, Life, and Literature, on June 6, ASP’s James J. Patterson was interviewed on E. Ethelbert Miller’s WPFW radio show, On the Margin. The conversation included personal reading and writing practices, science fiction, and the origin of ASP itself, along with discussion of the work in Patterson’s upcoming essay collection, which he described as “memoir meets The Twilight Zone.” Miller, evoking a writing exercise he uses in workshops, asked Patterson to name inspirational figures whom he considered his … [Read more...]

It was chilly, cloudy, and lovely in Seattle when I arrived half an hour early for the first of several panels I’d picked all the way back in December: “Grief in the Asian Diaspora” featuring panelists Chris Santiago, Victoria Chang, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Sejal Shah. Reading from an essay in Dear Memory (which I was lucky enough to have signed the next day), Victoria Chang quoted a fellow poet on the topic of their parents not talking about their pasts: “maybe it’s us, the next generation, who will write in response to that history.” Coming from a Japanese American family, that thought is at … [Read more...]