Of Poetry Podcast - Anna V.Q. Ross (Of Self-Portraits, Foxes, and Leaving For Good)

Anna V.Q. Ross (Of Self-Portraits, Foxes, and Leaving For Good)

11/29/23 • 71 min

Read: "Self Portrait with Arithmetic," "Self-Portrait Without Wings," and "Self-Portrait as Smaller Moon" at The Brooklyn Quarterly

Purchase: Flutter, Kick by Anna V. Q. Ross (Red Hen Press, 2022)

Anna V.Q. Ross's previous collections include If a Storm (Anhinga Press, winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry); Figuring (Bull City Press); and Hawk Weather (winner the New Women’s Voices Prize from Finishing Line Press and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Society).

A recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Fulbright Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center, her recent work appears in Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Nation, The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is poetry editor for Salamander Magazine and teaches at Tufts University and through the Emerson Prison Initiative. Anna lives with her family in Dorchester, where she runs the poetry and music series Unearthed Song & Poetry and raises chickens.

Reading/Viewing Recommendations:

Muriel Rukeyser's ("I lived in the first century of world wars")

Visual art by Shelly Julian Bunde ("She Left For Good One Time But Came Back")

Read: "Self Portrait with Arithmetic," "Self-Portrait Without Wings," and "Self-Portrait as Smaller Moon" at The Brooklyn Quarterly

Purchase: Flutter, Kick by Anna V. Q. Ross (Red Hen Press, 2022)

Reading/Viewing Recommendations:

Muriel Rukeyser's ("I lived in the first century of world wars")

Visual art by Shelly Julian Bunde ("She Left For Good One Time But Came Back")

Previous Episode

Lauren Camp (Of Mystery, Agnes Martin, and Silence as Bounty)

Listen: On Apple, Spotify, Google and elsewhere

Read: "Must Learn Neither," at Poetry Daily

Purchase: An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023)

Lauren Mukamal Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate, is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023). She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute. She was a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic, and artist in residence at Lowell Observatory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Reading/Viewing Recommendations:

Agnes Martin

Vija Celmins

Next Episode

Steven Leyva (Of Anti-Confession, Zydeco, and Clarity)

Read: "Here is a Sea We Cannot Call Sea" in Scalawag

Purchase: The Understudy's Handbook (WWPH, 2020).

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

Further Reading:

Lucille Clifton's Collected Poems

Taylor Byas, "THE POETICS OF PERFORMANCE IN STEVEN LEYVA’S THE UNDERSTUDY’S HANDBOOK"
The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair)