Maurice Manning answered your questions. Carl Phillips did too. Enjoy!

Poet(s) currently taking questions: None.

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Shara McCallum's book, Madwoman, Longlisted for 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Six books by writers from five Caribbean countries have been announced on the longlist for the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, sponsored by One Caribbean Media. The group ... [ read more ]

Smartish Pace 2017 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Editor Stephen Reichert selected the following poems from Issue 24 (April, 2017):

Safia Elhillo: “Self-Portrait With No Flag”
Nausheen Eusuf: “Allegiance”
Jennifer Koiter: “The Messy Girl Feels at Home ... [ read more ]

Campbell McGrath, Smartish Pace reading

Campbell McGrath in the Smartish Pace Reading Series at The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, on March 10, 2012. Intro by SP Associate Editor Clare Banks. 

Interview with Lynnell Edwards

Rachel Stark: First off, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview.  I'd like to start by talking about your subject matter.  Your most recent collection, The Highwayman's Wife, draws much of its energy from the way you revitalize mythology.  At the same time, you take on the English countryside with both the folklore of the highwayman and your numerous quotations from John Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar.  What is it about these things that are important to you?Lynnell Edwards: Some sort of unrelated things converged in the spring of 2004 that I think prompted the Highwayman series, the first of which was "Sonnet for the Highwayman."  I was tramping around in a very old cemetery in rural Kentucky where some of my Scottish ancestors (the McBrayers) from the 18th century were buried and I was talking with an elderly relative about that, and then an issue of Gourmet magazine arrived which had a feature on the Scottish Highlands, with several spectacular photos.  The photos were gorgeous; I can make only a modest case for Scottish cuisine, however.  After that first poem, I started exploring – in other words, I "Googled" – information about English ballads to see ... [ read more ]

Richard Georges: Make Us All Islands

First, a confession: there is a terror in writing a review like this, a low but present thrum, almost percussive: When (and where, and how – responsibly) to mention Walcott? The titanic figure casts such a shadow over the continental United State’s psychic construction (and, indeed, projection) of the Caribbean archipelago that it may be hard, at times, to unsee his images, to unlearn his influence. And yet, in Richard Georges’ debut collection Make Us ... [ read more ]