Announcements

July 2010: Sow’s Ear and the Shenandoah Arts Council Co-sponsor a Pair of Tasty Readings. Poetry, wine and chocolate. Is this a definition of heaven? Just maybe. Anyway, we’re surely aiming for something blissful at a pair of poetry readings held in Winchester, VA, this summer on July 31 and August 28. Each event begins with a focus on the culinary sublime and only keeps getting better later in the evening with readings by renowned Virginia and West Virginia poets.

On July 31, Wendell Hawken and Steve Scafidi will read. Wendy Hawken, from Boyce, VA, is a retired marketing executive, graduate of Vassar and Warren Wilson’s MFA program, and the author of the chapbook Mothertongue , published by Argonne House Press in 2001 and the full collection The Luck of Being, published by Backwaters Press in 2008. Steve Scafidi, who has published in such journals as American Poetry Review, New Virginia Review, and The Southern Review, is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (2001), his acclaimed first book which won the Larry Levis Reading Prize, and For Love of Common Words (2006). Both are from LSU Press.

Mark DeFoe and Judy Halebsky come to town on August 28. Defoe teaches the occasional literature or writing course at West Virginia Wesleyan University and pursues a wide-ranging literary life. He has received awards from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and Chatauqua Literary Journal, which gave him its national award for poetry in 2005. A former Bread Loaf Scholar, he has been a participant at the Frost Place Poetry Seminar, a judge in the WVA Poetry Out Loud competition, and editor of The Laurel Review. His collection Ten Scenes with Mockingbird received the 2009 Tennessee Chapbook Award. A native of Nova Scotia and traveler in Japan who now calls Falls Church, VA, home, Judy Halebsky, earned a PhD in performing arts from UC Davis and later spent three years in Japan studying Japanese literature and teaching. She has received grants from the MacDowell and Millay colonies and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her book Sky=Empty won the 2009 New Issues Poetry Prize.

Toothsome treats are provided by Shenandoah Fine Chocolates of Winchester and Julie’s Catering of Shippensburg, PA. The readings are held at 7:00 p.m. at the Shenandoah Arts Council Gallery at 811 S. Loudoun St. in Winchester, VA. The events are free, but cash donations are gratefully accepted.

July 2010: 2010 Chapbook Competition Winner. Steve Lautermilch of Kill Devil Hills, NC, has won the 2010 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Competition for his manuscript titled Rim. Contest judge Sam Rasnake mentioned the “amazing scope of the collection” and its “powerful voice that is both modern and at ease with the past—a voice on a journey.”

Lautermilch is a widely exhibited photographer as well as a poet, and both his photographs and his poems have been fed by his extensive travels, his naturalism, and his scholarly interest in psychology. His collection Mirror Light won the 2007 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award given by the New England Poetry Club, and Fire Seed & Rain, his twelfth book, won the 2008 Longleaf Press Chapbook Contest. He is the co-author of What Light Guides This Hand: Poems from Izumi Shikibu, a book of poems and fine art prints. His photograph “Blue Heron, Harbor Lights” is on the cover of The Poets Guide to the Birds (2008), edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser.

As the Sow’s Ear contest winner he receives a prize of $1000 and 25 copies of his chapbook published by Sow’s Ear Press. The book will also be distributed to the magazine’s approximately 500 subscribers as the Spring 2011 issue.

June 2010: Chapbook Contest Finalists: We are pleased to announce the finalists in the 2010 Sow’s Ear Chapbook Competition. The contest winner will be announced by the end of June 2010.

FINALISTS

E. Louise Beach., Quest

Larsen Bowker, Flowers from a Deeper Soil

Richard Brostoff, A Few Forms of Love

Sara Burant,  How Light Steals Through

Adam Day, When Everything Slept

Jennifer Franklin, Persephone's Ransom

Michael Grabell, Macho Man

Kathleen Kirk, Nocturnes

Steve Lautermilch, Rim

Michael Meyerhofer, Absentee Ballet

Jane Schapiro, Mrs. Cave's House

Richard Schiffman, Season's Greetings

Lynda Self, Before First Light

Margo Stever, Raven's Rock

Eric Trethewey, Trouble

Mark Wagenaar, The Little Bearers

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May 2010: New Rasnake Interview in Fictionaut. An interview by Meg Pokrass of our Associate Editor and chapbook competition judge, poet Sam Rasnake, has appeared in the Fictionaut Blog.

Sam reveals some of his main influences (Elizabeth Bishop, Bashō, William Stafford, Amy Clampitt) and pays particular homage to mentors such as Stafford and his colleagues at Sow’s Ear (Larry Richman, Nell Maiden, Errol Hess) who, with others, formed the community of writers he found supportive in the late 1980s, when the Review was founded.

He evokes musicians Townes Van Zandt, Tom Waits and Lucinda Williams and film makers Kieślowski, Kubrick and Kurosawa as essential to his creative process.

Though he talks about the necessity of time away from technology in order to feed his creativity, he has very positive things to say about the Internet, particularly such favorite sites as Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Metazen and Zoetrope—and even Facebook. He says, “Facebook has opened me to a different world of writers—and that’s been a great experience. I’ve met—in the virtual world—so many who have impacted me. I knew their works before, but had no contact with them. That alone has deepened my view of literature in a very universal sense, because the Internet connects the world. I can only hope I’ve moved others in some way.”

For the full interview, click here.

April 2010: Sow’s Ear Sponsors May 23 Reading in Norfolk, Virginia. The Review is sponsoring a reading in Norfolk featuring poets Rita Quillen, Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Stephanie Sugioka, and Sow’s Ear editor, Kristin Zimet. The event, “Silk Strophes,” is one of a host of special programs between March and June of 2010 coordinated through Minds Wide Open, a statewide celebration of women in the arts. The violinist Annika Jenkins will also perform.

The free event will be held on Sunday, May 23 from 2:00 p.m. until 4:00 p.m. in the Blocker Auditorium, Virginia Wesleyan College, 1584 Wesleyan Dr., Norfolk, Virginia. For further information contact Suzanne Rhodes at capriole10@yahoo.com or visit her website: www.RhodesNotTaken.com.

March 2010:  Judge for 2010 Poetry Contest Announced.  The distinguished American poet  X. J. Kennedy  will judge the 2010 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review’s Poetry Contest.
 
Born in Dover, New Jersey, in 1929, Kennedy served in the Navy, studied at the Sorbonne, and taught English at the University of Michigan, the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, and at Tufts, with visiting professorships at Wellesley, U.C. Irvine, and the University of Leeds.  He burst upon the American poetry scene in 1961 with Nude Descending a Staircase, which won the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets.  Since then, he has published more than ten collections of poems, numerous works for children, two novels, and several textbooks, including An Introduction to Poetry (with Dana Gioia) and Knock at a Star: A Child’s Introduction to Poetry (with his wife, Dorothy).  Michael J. Collins remarked that “the deft balance of the serious and the playful and the skillful use of rhyme and meter are the distinct and consistent qualities of Kennedy’s best poems.”

Contest submissions are received in September and October, with a postmark deadline of November 1.  The winner will receive $1000 and publication in the Review.  The reading fee is $27.  Poets interested in entering the contest should read the guidelines in the “Competitions” section of our website.

February 2010:  Dean Rader wins T. S. Eliot Prize.  The winner of Sow's Ear's 2009 Poetry Competition, Dean Rader, has won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for his collection Works and Days.  The award, sponsored by Truman State University Press, carries a cash prize of $2000 and publication by TSU Press.  Claudia Keelan judged.

January 2010: Poetry Contest Results. Contest judge Kelly Cherry has chosen “Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934” by Dean Rader as the winning poem in the 2009 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Poetry Competition, the 22^nd annual poetry competition sponsored by Sow’s Ear. Cherry praised the poem’s “brilliant depiction of the dust bowl” in often “gritty” language “rich with neologism…and simile….” The poem evokes the eighth-century BCE “singer of verses who reflects upon life, work, and duty.”

Dean Rader’s poems have appeared or will appear in POOL, Colorado Review, Quarterly West, Salamander, Poet Lore and many others. In 2008, he won the Crab Creek Review poetry prize. He blogs at The Weekly Rader, contributes regularly to The San Francisco Chronicle, and is an associate professor at the University of San Francisco.

Second place went to “Baladère Notturno” by Mark Wagenaar. Kelly Cherry says, “The mystery of time pervades this poem and surrounds it with sadness, though it is a restrained sadness, a sadness under control—perhaps hard-won control.” “It is a haunting poem that urges us to confront anxiety-provoking questions of time, death, self, and meaning.”

Mary Van Denend’s poem “Great Blue” won third place. Cherry praised its formal coherence, sounds, and cadences “emphasizing the heron’s quality of otherworldly precision” and its effective intertwining, for the reader, of instruction and enjoyment.

December 2009: Interview with Associate Editor Sam Rasnake. The website Poetry: The First 10 Years of the New Millennium has published a very informative and revealing interview of our colleague, chapbook competition judge, and editor of the online poetry journal Blue Fifth Review. Sam’s poem “Chamber Music” is included. http://goss183.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/sam-rasnake/

December 2009: A New Book Review Feature. Sow’s Ear is pleased to add a new feature—reviews of books on certain themes. Our Associate Editor and book reviewer, Nancy White, is seeking books (including chapbooks) related to the following themes: political poetry, humorous poetry, poetry about childhood, and poetry about the world of work. Reviews of books (3 or 4 at a time) on these themes are planned for upcoming issues of Sow’s Ear. If your book or the book of someone whose work you admire falls into any of these thematic categories, let Nancy know at nancellini@aol.com

December 2009: Rate Increases. Due to rising costs, we regret that we must raise rates on subscriptions and contest reading fees effective January 1, 2010. Any subscription received prior to that date will be payable at the previous rates. The good news is that for the first time we are offering discounts for multiple-year subscriptions. If you subscribe for two years at a time, you save the price of one whole issue. Savings are even greater for three-year subscriptions. So why not join our readership for multiple years, or get a subscription and give one as a gift at the same time?

Subscription

Single Issue - $8
Contest Reading Fee (Poetry Competition, Chapbook Competition) - $27

November 2009: Poetry Contest Finalists: We are pleased to announce the finalist poems in the 2009 Sow’s Ear Poetry Competition. The contest winner will be announced in January 2010.

FINALISTS

June 2009: 2009 Chapbook Competition Winner. Kathleen Spivack’s collection A History of Yearning has won the 2009 Sow’s Ear Chapbook Competition. Sam Rasnake judged. She received a prize of $1000 and 25 copies of her chapbook. Spivack is the author of six books of poems, most recently Moments of Past Happiness (Earthwinds Editions, 2007). She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for The Beds We Lie In (Scarecrow Press, 1986). A student of Robert Lowell, she has written about him and other noted American poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, and Stanley Kunitz. Since 1990, she has been Visiting Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at universities in France as well as a Fulbright Professor. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Paris Review. She has taught at Yaddo and MacDowell and at creative writing programs at Santa Fe, Aspen, Skidmore and other locations throughout the US and abroad.

January 2009: 2008 Sow’s Ear Poetry Competition Winner. Becky Dennison Sakellariou’s poem “Bone” has won the 2008 Sow’s Ear Poetry Competition. Eleanor Wilner judged. She received $1000 and publication in the Summer 2009 issue of the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Sakellariou was born and raised in New England but has lived and worked in Greece for many years. She is a teacher, mediator and counselor. Living in Greece has influenced her politically, socially, and visually, and many of her poems spring from her mixture of heritages. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Poetry Prize. In 2005, she won the Blue Light Press Chapbook Contest for The Importance of Bone. In Greece, she lives on the island of Euboia in the midst of a natural beauty which inspires her.

August 2008: New Managing Editor of Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Robert G. Lesman of Millwood, VA, has become the new managing editor of the The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, replacing Errol Hess, who, with a group of writers, founded the magazine in 1989. Besides his invaluable service to the magazine, Errol is credited with inventing the name of the magazine, inspired by his raising of pigs. Lesman is a poet and former English professor. His main responsibilities involve administering Sow’s Ear’s two annual contests and representing the magazine by attending literary events and responding to queries. He also manages subscriptions.

June 2008: 2008 Sow’s Ear Chapbook Competition Winner. Maureen Seaton’s manuscript America Loves Carney has won the 2008 Sow’s Ear Chapbook Competition. Sam Rasnake judged. She received a prize of $1000 and 25 copies of her chapbook. Seaton is the author of the memoir Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) and six poetry collections, most recently, Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2009). She is the co-author, with Duhamel and David Trinidad, of Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. She has won the Audre Lord Award, the Iowa Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Furious Cooking, the Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship, among other honors. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, New Republic, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches at the University of Miami.

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