An Announcement

The good news?

The good news is that a set of poems I wrote on the American painter Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) has won the Arts & Letters / Rumi Prize in Poetry. In addition to a cash prize and publication of the poems in the Fall issue of Arts & Letters, I will be reading at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville on Friday, November 9.

The winner of the Fiction Prize--I don't yet know who that is--will also be reading.

The poems are from my manuscript-in-progress titled Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds, which is concerned, in part, with Heade's trip to Brazil during the American Civil War and his (sadly, unsuccessful) attempt to print and market a book of hummingbird lithographs.

Arts & Letters is an elegant, beautifully printed, and smartly edited journal. GC&SU has a wonderful writing program and a great staff. And because I am a big fan of Flannery O'Connor (she went to GC&SU when it was the Georgia College for Women and lived on her family's farm just outside of town), I am particularly looking forward to visiting Milledgeville.

I couldn't be happier.

Here is one of Heade's more well-known paintings, Approaching Thunderstorm (1859), which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.