All posts tagged: 2014

Amherst Poetry Festival

September 12, 2014
Event Date:
Saturday, September 20, 2014 – 10:00am – 5:00pm
Location: 
Sweetser Park, Amherst, MA
Celebrate verse with The Common at the Amherst Poetry Festival. We’ll have a booth at Sweetser Park from 10am–5pm with poetry listening stations, a raffle contest, and baked goodies from Whole Foods. From 2:00–2:30pm, we’ll take the Sweetser Park Stage to read poetry from Issue 07. The festival also features live readings, conversations, the Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon, and a special edition of NerdNite Noho. Click here for more details.
Amherst Poetry Festival
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I Believe in New Yorkers

September 8, 2014 ,

By MELODY NIXON

skyline from subway

“I believe New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question.”

– Dylan Thomas

In my first months in New York City I rode in the back of taxicabs through Central Park thinking, “When will this sink in? When will it feel like I know where I am.” I didn’t think I was dreaming – rather, I felt the whole city was dreaming with me inside of it, a poppy-field illusion, a drug trip induced by hidden valves releasing an experimental hallucinogen. The city needed to pinch itself awake, collectively, and climb out of the hollow to find out what was really going on.

“I stopped at Lexington Avenue,” wrote Joan Didion of her arrival in the city, “and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.” You arrive, you reach the mirage, and you wait for it to clear.

I Believe in New Yorkers
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Words Often Unheard

September 5, 2014

Curated by: STEPHANIE SOSA

In August 2013, Amherst College acquired one of the most comprehensive collections of books by Native American Indian authors ever assembled by a private collector. This collection, from Pablo Eisenberg, consists of about 1,500 books that include poetry, fiction, history, philosophy, and many other works. Even texts by some of the first Native American Indian writers to be published in their lifetimes, such as Samson Occom, William Apess, and Elias Boudinot, are a part of this vast collection. The Robert Frost Library seeks to show as much as possible of the history of Native American writing and philosophy in their exhibit: The Younghee Kim-Wait Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection.

Words Often Unheard
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Review: Motherland

Review: Motherland

September 4, 2014

Book by MARIA HUMMEL
Reviewed by SUE REPKO

motherland

The epigraph to Maria Hummel’s latest novel Motherland is a short poem of the same title by the German poet Rose Ausländer (in German “Mutterland”).

My Fatherland is dead
They buried it
In fire

I live
in my Motherland—
Word

—translation by Eavan Boland

The poem encapsulates the novel, set in Germany in the last year of World War II, in which a young German wife and stepmother repeatedly risks her own life to keep her new family intact. Motherhood—stepmotherhood in this case—becomes her reason for being.

Review: Motherland
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Sorting through a Dream World: An Interview with Valerie Duff

September 1, 2014

MARNI BERGER interviews VALERIE DUFF

Valerie Duff

Valerie Duff is the author of the poetry collection To the New World. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Prague Revue, Ploughshares, Blackbox Manifold, Poetry Northeast, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and Issue 07 of The Common. She is poetry editor of Salamander Magazine. Marni Berger and Valerie Duff spoke long distance this summer about Mexico City, Virginia, Boston, and writing poetry as if you’re sorting through a dream world.

Sorting through a Dream World: An Interview with Valerie Duff
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AWP Writers Conference in Minneapolis

August 22, 2014
Event Date: 
Thursday, April 9, 2015 – 9:00am – Saturday, April 11, 2015 – 11:59pm
Location: 
Minneapolis Convention Center & Hilton Minneapolis Hotel

Are you attending AWP this year? Join our Facebook Group to stay updated on our events!

The Common will host a booth at AWP 2015 from April 9-11. Visit us at Booth 923!

Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker will also be speaking at two panels at AWP 2015: “Pinning Editors Down: Lit Mag Fiction Editors Define What Works” and “Periodically Speaking: How to Bring Lit Mags into the Classroom.” Stay tuned for more details.

AWP Writers Conference in Minneapolis
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Brooklyn Book Festival

August 18, 2014

Event Date: 

Sunday, September 21, 2014 – 10:00am – 6:00pm
Location: 
Brooklyn, NY

 

The Common will share a booth with Restless Books at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 21st (rain or shine). Visit us at Booth 205!

Location: Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza, 209 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

The Brooklyn Book Festival is the largest free literary event in New York City, presenting an array of national and international literary stars and emerging authors. One of America’s premier book festivals, this hip, smart diverse gathering attracts thousands of book lovers of all ages to enjoy authors and the festival’s lively literary marketplace. [Click here for more information]

Brooklyn Book Festival
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Yoshida and Tanaka

Yoshida and Tanaka

August 13, 2014

By CHRIS KELSEY 

Each day during my week in Yokohama I played a game with Yoshida and Tanaka. They were responsible for the cleanliness of rooms on at least the 14th floor of a towering, fan-shaped, waterfront hotel. I was there for a geotechnical engineering conference.

Yoshida and Tanaka
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