Happy National Poetry Month from Red Hen Press! Our next collaboration with Mercurius Magazine features four poems from collections published by Red Hen this April.
Read the poems here!
News & Review Type: News
Four Red Hen poets with new books out this month featured on Mercurius Magazine!
Q&A from UC Davis with Sadie Hoagland, upcoming author of STRANGE CHILDREN!
Examining Beliefs
by Jocelyn Anderson | Apr 19, 2021 | Alumni Authors, Culture
In her debut novel, Sadie Hoagland, M.A. ’09, tells a fictional story of faith, cruelty and redemption through eight adolescent narrators.
Strange Children (Red Hen Press, 2021) is set in a polygamist commune in the desert — a girl and boy fall in love, breaking religious law. After they are caught, their paths diverge, leading to murder and a crime that will unravel the community. The book is due out in May.
“The book is called Strange Children, because even the conception of a child is different [in this culture],” said Hoagland, who is also an associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “If you are conceiving of children as being able to be married at such young ages, it’s an older conception, compared to how we perceive them in our dominant culture.”
Hoagland uses point of view — with eight separate narrators — to show how perspectives differ depending upon who is telling the story. Here, Hoagland shares more about the book and what’s next for her as an author.
Did you always want to be a writer?
Yes, from a pretty young age I wanted to be a writer. I wrote a novel at the age of 8 about a dog that went missing in the neighborhood. I was always writing plays for my friends to act in. I definitely always did, however, I didn’t always feel like it was feasible, because I felt that I couldn’t make a living as a writer, or there wasn’t a career for me. So I majored in psychology, which I loved, but it wasn’t until I got to the UC Davis graduate program when I felt that I could do this.
Sadie Hoagland’s “Best Books Narrated by Ghosts” snippet.
The Books I Picked & Why
Written by Sadie Hoagland
Beloved
By Toni Morrison
Why this book?
I cannot talk about ghosts in books with pausing to give homage to the outstanding and heartbreaking story of Sethe and the ghost of her daughter, called Beloved after her gravestone, whom Sethe killed to spare her a life of torture and rape as a slave. An embodied, adult Beloved returns to Sethe, “a greedy ghost” that “needed lots of love, which is only natural, considering.” Beloved only speaks in her own voice for a brief period in the book, and when she does we see her embodiment waver, she is both herself and others (“there is no place where I stop”), both a murdered daughter and a conglomeration of generations of suffering under slavery. Morrison’s employment of a ghost seems only natural considering the story she tells, one that asks us to truly see the horrific conditions of slavery in the pure poetry of her prose.
Jennifer Risher, author of WE NEED TO TALK, is featured on Rational Reminder podcast!
Jennifer Risher is the author of “We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth” which tells her story and explores the impact of wealth on identity, relationships, and sense of place in the world. Jennifer was born in Seattle, Washington, grew up in Oregon, and graduated from Connecticut College. She joined Microsoft in 1991 where she worked as a recruiter and then as a product manager.
Listen to the episode here!
MOON JAR author Didi Jackson’s “Bobolink” featured in Poem-a-Day!
Read the poem here!
Khalisa Rae featured in The Chronicle!
On April 17 at the Hayti Heritage Center, seven slam poets competed for a coveted spot on the 2021 Bull City Slam Team. These poets are a part of the 16 year legacy of the “Triangle’s longest running poetry event” — the Jambalaya Soul Slam. Since 2005, poets have competed monthly. 12 slam poets, 18 years of age or older, can participate in these monthly slams. Some slams have specific themes, including an erotic poetry slam this February. The 12 winning poets faced-off in the April Grand Slam Finals. The top four poets — Grand Slam Champion and the next three highest-scoring — form the BCST for that year. The BCST goes on to compete in the Southern Fried regional slam poetry competition each June.
Read the full article here!
GHOST IN A BLACK GIRL’S THROAT on list of “Best Southern Books of April 2021”
There are so many wonderful books coming out this month we just want to rave about them all! Since April is National Poetry Month, we included three poetry collections by Tiana Nobile, Khalisa Rae, and Kendra DeColo, and they are absolutely worth celebrating any month of the year. We’ve also got essay collections and novels by Southern authors and set in Bush-era Atlanta, Florida, 1920s Mississippi, Tennessee in the aftermath of the Civil War, and South Carolina.
Find the full list here!
GHOST IN A BLACK GIRL’S THROAT (Khalisa Rae) listed on Poetry Daily!
Wondering what new books have just been published? We seriously consider every book we receive, and we feature poems from many of the best and most interesting collections among them, but it would be impossible to feature every fine book. Browse every book we’ve received in the past six months here—plus the list of journals and magazines we read regularly.
Read the list here!
Allison Joseph and William Archila featured on LA Times Festival of Books Poetry Stage!
Please enjoy these readings on our first ever virtual poetry “stage” produced in partnership with Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center.
Be sure to scroll through the entire page, as there are several readings from so many talented poets available to view including Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award-Winner, local L.A. poets Sesshu Foster, William Archila and Yesika Salgado, 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize finalists Victoria Chang, Anthony Cody and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and many more. Stay tuned to this page for additional poets being added!
Find the author readings here!
THE GRAVEDIGGER’S ARCHEOLOGY poet, William Archila, featured in the LA Times!
At dozens of cafes, libraries and bookstores — even a garage in Bell — Southern California teemed with poetry readings and open mike nights before COVID-19 took hold of the world.
Some of these events managed to survive by migrating online. Others we’ve lost for good.
Now, as the vaccination rollout continues and an end to the pandemic appears in sight, we’ve asked five poets at very different points in their careers to reflect on the confinement and share their hopes for what lies ahead.
Click here to read more!
Thea Prieto (FROM THE CAVES) writes article for Poets & Writers!
For the past decade an international community of women and nonbinary writers have been working to claim space for themselves in an industry historically dominated by men. Known as Women Who Submit (WWS), the group supports and empowers its members to submit their work in spite of publishing’s inequities. Their achievements have been extraordinary: This July, the organization celebrates its tenth year, with twenty-seven chapters across the United States and Mexico, more than one hundred fifty successful book and magazine publication credits by its members in 2020, and a devoted community of writers, editors, and publishers.
Click here to read more!
Khalisa Rae’s GHOST IN A BLACK GIRL’S THROAT featured in The Root!
How does trauma affect the way we live our day-to-day lives? Is inherited or intergenerational trauma more significant than a trauma—or traumas—experienced firsthand? There are perspectives and arguments to consider for each side: Dealing with inherited trauma is multilayered, convening in a complex web of emotions. Being exposed to or experiencing an immense trauma can be just as complex, if not more.
Click here to read more!
IN JUNE THE LABYRINTH poet, Cynthia Hogue, reads for The Arkansas International!
Take a moment and watch Cynthia Hogue read in celebration of The Arkansas International’s Issue 10 Launch!!
Cynthia Hogue’s most recent collections are Revenance (2014), listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets, and In June the Labyrinth (2017), both from Red Hen Press. Her third co-translation is Nicole Brossard’s Lointaines (forthcoming, 2022). Among her honors are two NEA Fellowships, a MacDowell residency, and the Witter Bynner Translation Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. She lives in Tucson.
Click here to watch!
Sadie Hoagland (STRANGE CHILDREN) author-to-author interview in CRAFT Literary!
SADIE HOAGLAND: John, I so enjoyed reading The Fear of Everything. Each story balances humor and darkness so well, and each piece held the sort of “good surprises” I love in fiction—the unexpected turns. I think one of my favorite moments in the book is in “The Blueprint of Your Brain,” when you are describing why/how Jimmy burned down his parents’ garage. Initially we learn of this event—the garage burning—from an external standpoint, and connect it with Jimmy’s boredom as a “latchkey” kid. But then we learn that Jimmy felt such intense shame at being mocked by his father while listening to old records that he was trying to burn the phonograph. This is so succinct and subtle in the story—but it’s gut-wrenching too. The father seems at fault, in the end, for the garage.
Read the full conversation here!
Jennifer Risher guests on Working Wife, Happy Life podcast!
Ep 33 – Talking about Money & Wealth w/ Jennifer Risher
What’s your relationship with money? How about your partner’s relationship with money? Do you talk about it? Does it make you uncomfortable? What do you wish you could say but don’t to those around you when it comes to money?
Unpack all of these questions and more with today’s guest — Jennifer Risher joins us as the author of the memoir “We Need to Talk: A Memoir about Wealth”. Jen grew up with middle-class values, saving her pennies, wary of the rich… and then she joined their ranks. She is an extra-lucky beneficiary of the dot com boom. We Need to Talk tells her story and explores the impact of wealth on identity, relationships, and sense of place in the world. This book uncovers so much of what we talk about on this podcast, emotional relationships with money, how our perceptions and engagement with money are influenced by our upbringing, how money does and doesn’t change you, how we connect, or disconnect, on the topic and more.