Mary Odden’s Blog
Date: June 4, 2020
https://www.maryodden.com/neighborsblog
Date: June 4, 2020
https://www.maryodden.com/neighborsblog
Date: June 3, 2020
My new novel Glorious Boy began with a dream. On a tropical island during an emergency evacuation, a young girl was hiding in a dense rainforest with a small, mute white boy […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Aimee Liu talks about GLORIOUS BOY, the excruciating process of writing, creating a memorable silent character, her shapeshifter dad, and so much more.
Date: June 3, 2020
Some 30 years ago, an established nonfiction writer and a screenwriter decided to write their first novels. They met in a fiction writing class, and have been friends ever since, […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Featured mentioning of Percival Everett’s Colonel Hap Thompson!
Date: June 3, 2020
Presented in five poetic sequences, the poems in Hold Me Tight by gay poet Jason Schneiderman focuses the reader’s attention on the subjects of anger, real and metaphorical wolves, the work of the late […]
Date: June 3, 2020
At 15, Plum Valentine is banished from her Brooklyn home and sent back to Jamaica by parents nervous about the pernicious effects of the American lifestyle. Once there, her trust […]
Date: June 3, 2020
In the bedroom of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, there’s a mural depicting a well-dressed crowd at a cocktail party pasted to the wall. Spencer’s granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester, points to […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Family relations can be fraught in the best of times, even when people care deeply for one another. So what happens when you throw those family members into a situation […]
Date: June 3, 2020
It’s Detroit, 1968. Sisters Rosa and Esther march against the war in Vietnam with their best friend, Maggie. As they reached the rally site, double rows of blank-faced National Guard […]
Date: May 7, 2009
Date: May 6, 2009
"Green is an intensely formal poet–not in tone, but in construction. Look at that table of contents again: five groups of ten. A desire for symmetry, some revelatory order. He […]
Date: May 6, 2009
Dan Wickett, on the widely-read blog for his Emerging Writers Network, lists Earthquake I.D. as one of the best books of 2007, and awards it 4 stars. "A great, jam-packed […]
Date: May 6, 2009
Praise for Earthquake I.D. from Thomas Burke, in THE LITERARY REVIEW (50/3, Spring 2007): "an exploration of contrasts: opulence and destitution; the loved, the loving, and the dissatisfied; intractable guilt, […]
Date: May 2, 2009
"Everything I write requires this: Alphabet." A child sees letters first, "shape distinguishing itself from its background," but soon we lose the innocence of that first encounter to ideas of […]
Date: April 24, 2009
Dungy's first poetry collection offers a number of ways to look at what is considered to be a part of nature, whether it is a part of the plants or […]
Date: April 22, 2009
Sholeh Wolpe's Rooftops of Tehran is that truly rare event: an important book of poetry. Brushing against the grain of Persian-Islamic culture, she sings a deep affection for what she […]
Date: April 19, 2009
Perhaps there is no present, and existence is built of the alterable past moving into the alterable future, and then through the opaque door of death. Or perhaps there is […]
Date: April 18, 2009
http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2007/04/leslie-heywood-proving-grounds.htmlMONDAY, APRIL 2, 2007Leslie Heywood: THE PROVING GROUNDSLeafing through the work in Leslie Heywood's premiere book of poetry, The Proving Grounds, one quickly becomes accustomed to uncovering sometimes uncomfortable and […]
Date: April 16, 2009
"In the debut collection from Kentucky poet Nickole Brown, readers experience the pleasures of poetry "the illuminated moment reverberating" as well as the pleasures of the novel–the narrative unfurling, driven […]