“Safiya Sinclair writes strange, mythological, gorgeously elaborate lyric poems, with a diction that is both arcane and contemporary …. Her language is distinctive, assured, and a marvel to read.
—Cathy Park Hong, from her introduction to Safiya Sinclair in Boston Review
NER author and 2016 Bread Loaf Fellow Safiya Sinclair has had her first full-length collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), published. Sinclair received the 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award, and Cannibal won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile.
Sinclair was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is also the author of the chapbook Catacombs (Argos Books, 2011). She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
Sinclair’s poem “Good Hair” was published NER 37.2. Cannibal is available from University of Nebraska Press and other booksellers.
℘
“Mead’s earthiness sometimes morphs into otherworldliness …. In addressing the relationship of mortality to ideas of resolution, celebration, and homecoming, Mead asks, “How will you spend your courage?”
– Publishers Weekly
NER poet Jane Mead’s fifth collection of poetry, World of Made and Unmade, will be published by Alice James Books in September 2016. Selections from World of Made And Unmade will appear in NER 37.3.
Mead is the author of four full-length books of poetry, most recently Money Money Money | Water Water Water, from Alice James Books. Her poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals and she is the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations. She has taught at many colleges and universities including Colby College, The University of Iowa and Wake Forest University. She now manages the ranch her grandfather purchased in the early 1900’s in Northern California, where she grows zinfandel and cabernet wine-grapes. She teaches in the Drew University low-residency MFA program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.
℘
“The Exit Coach is a book of wonderful, astute stories. Staffel’s characters keep falling upon whatever they least expect. . . . A remarkable collection.”
—Joan Silber
NER author Megan Staffel‘s collection The Exit Coach will be published by Four Way Books in September 2017. The Exit Coach is a compilation of six short stories and a novella, all “linked through reoccurring characters, settings, and themes. The protagonists experience deeply personal transformations and struggle to reconcile their various personas and shifting identities” (Publisher’s Weekly). “Tertium Quid,” one of the stories in the collection, was published in NER 32.4. Staffel’s work has also appeared in NER 31.1, 34.2, and on NER Digital.
Staffel is the author of the collection of short fiction, Lessons in Another Language (Four Way Books) and two novels, The Notebook of Lost Things (Soho Press) and She Wanted Something Else ( North Point Press) and a first collection of short stories, A Length of Wire and Other Stories (Pym-Randall Press). Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals including New England Review, The Northwest Review, Ploughshares, Gargoyle, The Seattle Review, and The Kansas Quarterly. Her stories have been short listed in Best American Short Stories and nominated for The Pushcart Prize.
Staffel teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Previously, she taught at the University of Iowa, Kansas State University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Vermont College. She has two adult children and splits her time between Brooklyn, New York and and a farm in a small town in western New York State.
℘
Monica Youn, a three-time NER poet, will have her third collection of poetry published this September. Blackacre: Poems (Graywolf Press) “is virtuosic: poems so sharp and fine they cut deep past the body or the self or the mind—they’re needles of rain carving out a canyon. Death is as close as birth, and as far. Youn dazzles with her enigmatic loopholes—the taut noose, the elusive umbilicus, the Möbius qualities of longing and lack and love—which shadow or shape who we are, and what can be called ours” (Brenda Shaughnessy).
Youn is the author of two previous poetry collections, Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former lawyer, she teaches at Princeton University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poetry has previously appeared in NER 21.1, 22.3, and 37.1.
℘
NER translator Ian Ganassi‘s poetry collection, titled Mean Numbers (China Grove Press), will be published on September 15. Ganassi writes, “I would like my poems to change people’s experience of reality, to help free them, if only briefly, from what Wallace Stevens called the ‘malady of the quotidian.'”
Ganassi’s new translation of the Aeneid, Book 7, appears in the most recent issue of NER (37.2). Ganassi’s translations of books 1–6 of the Aeneid have appeared previously in NER. He is the inaugural winner of the China Grove Prize in Poetry. His poetry and prose have appeared in more than 50 literary journals. Critical essays have appeared in Octopus, American Letters & Commentary, The Gettysburg Review, and Boulevard, among others. Selections from “The Corpses,”a collage series in collaboration with painter Laura Bell, have been included in art and literary publications and exhibited in galleries in New York City, New Haven, CT, and elsewhere. Ganassi has worked as a percussionist, accompanying Modern, Caribbean, and African dance in New Haven, and as a teacher of writing and literature.
Mean Numbers is available online and from China Grove Press.
