Bypassed

For those who are wondering, the river at Lewisburg did not flood. However, there is significant flooding at points east, including Danville, Bloomsburg, and on and on. Binghamton, as you've probably heard, has been hit hard.

Hope everyone is safe out there.

Go, Becca!

Congrats to our Becca Wadlinger (BYP '05)--her poem "Later, People Took on Qualities that Planets Usually Have," from Pebble Lake Review, is reprinted today on Verse Daily.

Chapbook Opportunity for Asian American Poets

[reposted from Nick Carbo's blog]:

The Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize

Deadline: June 30, 2006
Judge: John Yau
Prize: $500, Barrow Street publication, & Full Scholarship to Kundiman Retreat 2007
Fee: $15, payable to The New York Foundation for the Arts
Guidelines: www.kundiman.org
Eligibility: Asian American poets who have not published more than one book of forty-eight pages or more.

Backstory: On June 19, 1982, in Detroit, Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a man and his stepson. The two laid-off autoworkers mistook Chin for Japanese — an Asian group they blamed for the ailing U.S. auto industry. The assailants never served jail time, and later federal civil-rights courts acquitted them entirely of the crime. For many today, this is a rarely remembered footnote in American history. However, the tragedy of Vincent Chin marked an important change in how Asian Americans viewed themselves. It was the first time, according to APA advocates and academics, that people who traced their ancestry to different countries in Asia and the Pacific Islands crossed ethnic and socioeconomic lines to fight [politically] as a united group of Asian Pacific Americans. They were Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino; they were waiters, lawyers, and grandmothers who were moved to action by what happened to Vincent Chin. For the first time, Asian Americans banded together against the discrimination and racism directed toward the APA community. Decades later, the need for Asian Americans to unite as a population and to project a voice into the cultural mainstream is as urgent as ever. In honor of Vincent Chin and this watershed moment in Asian American history, Kundiman and Barrow Street are sponsoring The Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize. This annual prize is an opportunity for both Kundiman and Barrow Street to support and spotlight the talent of an emerging Asian American poet, a new voice in the landscape of Asian American expression and power.

Thinking ahead to Atlanta,

where I'll be traveling this spring for the AWP Conference, and wondering how many of y'all are planning to go? I've been to AWP three times and have never attended one of the many parties--not even with my grad school buddies from Vermont--though this time, this time, I really want to. There are just too many people I miss. So who's going?

Last night's reading in Bucknell Hall was super, and the after party at the cottage (I actually went, and stayed till eleven) delightful. This morning the poets disperse, but we shall have photos soon (I hope) and I know that we'll be hearing more from our gang of twelve.

Paula asked me to read a poem with the staff, which was really sweet of her. I dashed up the hall to log into the West Branch computer, plugged in my flash drive, played "this one? or that one?" for about twenty seconds and then printed out a new poem. It was great fun to read it out loud.

Walked Deirdre back to her car, feeling punchy and energized and sad all at once. Did you know that she and Bill are moving into their new house? It's only half a block down the street--the same street--in Mifflinburg.

The catalpa trees have lost their frothy blooms. It's funny how I never notice the beany pods until they're fully formed. I always associate catalpa flowers with the June Seminar. Right now the oak leaf hydrangeas are blooming all over campus. I'm grading papers in my office (in the geology/psychology building, of all places) and thinking about putting a big honking rainbow sticker on my office window: every day I hear campus tour guides leading knots of prospective students past the building--it would be good to show a visible sign of diversity, even though I'm not a rainbow sort of queer.

Okay. Back to work.

Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang

So sweet to see Betsy getting misty this morning over the imminent departure of this year's awesome Gang of Twelve. . . Tomorrow night's the final reading. Michael Waters and a dozen BYPs, rocking Bucknell Hall. It's been a treat, even from my office high on the hill, to know the poets were back in town.

I re-sent the Blogger invitation to the folks who weren't able to log on first time around. Don't know what's up with that. Hope it works. If you're reading this, it did.

Drew, Ashley, Rasheeda, Jeff, Sophie, Jane, Marianne, Caitlin, Matthew, Emily, Steven, Rachel: Here's to the group that made sunglasses cool again. Stay in touch, y'all.