As part of the art faculty at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, I created the school’s first-ever digital poetry anthology that represents the students in the Literary Media and Communications Department. Here’s an excerpt from my introduction: The online anthology derived its name from the famed print anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets […]
Tuesday, I was interviewed on NPR along with Lauren Wilcox, the Washington Post Magazine reporter who wrote the cover story “Is Poetry Dead?” (the article I’m quote in). Check out the show here!
That’s right! Lauren Wilcox, the Washington Post Magazine reporter, came through the DC Creative Writing Workshop and interviewed me, the program’s Exec. Dir. Nancy Schwalb, and our students. It was a great time! Here’s an excerpt from that article: On a recent weekday in Frances Harrington’s classroom at Hart Middle School in Anacostia, there was […]
During his discussion Thursday, Indigo Moor had a question for his fellow Stonecoast grad students. “How many harmonica players does it take to screw in a light bulb?” He looked around at the puzzled expressions of writers straining their brains to figure out the punch line. Then everyone laughed when Indigo quoted a harmonica player: […]
Cait Johnson raised some eyebrows and made a roomful of writers blush when she talked about orgasms. According to Cait, a Stonecoast faculty, the best orgasms happen when two people are vulnerable and intimate with each other. To hear her tell it, that same intensity’s achieved when writers engage in other genres. Cait’s wise words […]
I don’t know about the other attendees, but I’m still swooning from Jan Beatty’s reading at Split This Rock 2010. That year marked the second time for the biennial literary festival that Sarah Browning started as a way of providing a “permanent home for progressive poets.” Since it started in 2008, Split This Rock has […]
Here’s what the “WordPress.com stats helper monkeys” came up with in their 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out […]
Drift (Willow Books, 2012) is now available. Order it from Small Press Distribution or get it directly from me: Praise for Drift: “Tender and tough, the poems in Alan King’s wonderful debut book of poems, Drift, reveal the cities of memory, love and friendship with the precise and caring eye of a poet deeply invested […]
The panel of poets at a Baltimore City Library quietly considered an audience member’s question: “When did you know you were a poet?” Evie Shockley, a presenter, smiled as the response brewed in her mind. She’d been asking herself the same thing until she took a poetry workshop led by Lucille Clifton. If you wrote […]
The speakers in both Major Jackson’s 11-part poem “Urban Renewal” (from Leaving Saturn) and Audre Lorde’s Coal are both city dwellers coming to terms with the changing landscape. They fear possibly being displaced and mourn the once familiar structures city officials left “crumbling to gutted relics.”[1] The speakers aren’t alone in their suffering. “A chorus […]
Alan W. King 