I’m excited to be offering a workshop for Black Lawrence Press on Tuesday, 11/9/21. This event is free, but registration is required. Full information here! I’ll be sharing some approaches for reconnecting with poetry, and with your own work.

In this workshop we will ponder our relationship with poems in general, and with our own poems in particular, discussing strategies for approaching difficult subjects, as well as new ways to direct inspiration. We will also talk about a gentle approach to writerly goal-setting, especially as it relates to growing a series of poems into a collection. Q&A will be an important part of the conversation.

Recommended reading for the workshop:

1) “Dear Sugar, The Rumpus Advice Column #72: The Future Has an Ancient Heart” by Cheryl Strayed

2) “Twenty-Two Poem Hacks” by Carmen Giménez Smith

Friends, this update is long overdue. I’m coming to you on the cusp of week eight of the semester, a semester where I am teaching both online and in person + online at the same time. It’s, as they say, a doozy. Little time for writing and sending work out. Dreaming about eventually getting caught up or being able to read a book for fun. Here are a few updates since my last post.

It was an honor to have two flash fiction pieces published in On the Seawall. Here’s a link to “More Harm Than Good” and “Late August Edition.”

You can also check out three new poems in The Adroit Journal issue 34: “Your Damage,” “A Gentle Reminder,” and “I Found Your Diary and It Was Blank.”

Big thanks to Verse Daily for featuring my poem “Open Letter on Absent Friends,” from Southern Indiana Review.

Sending best wishes to all!

I’m so excited to be reading with fellow Black Lawrence Press poet Callista Buchen this Thursday at 3:00 EST for the Black Lawrence Press Virtual Reading Series. Details here. Registration is very easy. We would love to share some poems with you! 

We would love to see you in Portland for these book signings. More on these new books here.

I’m so excited to share the cover of my forthcoming prose poetry collection, Partial Genius, as well as the first blurb, which was written by my poetry hero Heather Derr-Smith. Thank you so much for your support!

I love this book so much. A work of meticulous craft and profound originality, Mary Biddinger’s newest collection of prose poems is one of the best books I’ve read on our historical moment and the decades that led to it. PARTIAL GENIUS reads like a dossier of the psychological landscape of late capitalist America and the end of empire. In the tradition of John Ashbery, but wholly original in her own vision and voice, Biddinger draws from a deep well of poetic intellect and wit to illuminate the existential threats and imaginative possibilities of our collective self-destruction. In “The Subject Pool” the speaker watches a man tattoo AU COURANT around her thigh. The tattoo artist has no idea. Every poem is chock-full of revelations in every detail. Reading this book felt like sitting by the fire in some secret location with a double agent, smoking her pipe telling tales of all that went down right in front of our collective faces, while we were all driven to distraction by outrage. To paraphrase Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, She’s got it all in this book.  –Heather Derr-Smith

A new year always feels fresh, and I’m entering this one with a lot of goals. There’s a new poetry collection in the works, and I’ll be teaching two of my favorite classes, both at the undergrad level (advanced poetry writing and writers on writing). This will also be my last semester of a six-year gig as assistant chair and undergraduate advisor in my department, which means that starting in the fall I’ll teach more, spend less time in office hours, and hang out at the Press instead of the advising office. I am looking forward to this, though have a lot of book management to attend to in the meantime (moving them from one office to the next).

This is also the year of Partial Genius, my new collection of prose poems, which is due out in August from Black Lawrence Press. Stay tuned for updates on that, including cover and blurbs in the near future.