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CQ is pleased to announce that Corrie Williamson and Suzanne Marie Hopcroft are our 2013 nominees for Best New Poets. Williamson’s poem “The Mole, the Sweet Potato, and the Possibility of Allegory” appeared in Issue 62.2 and Hopcroft’s poem “One-Way” was published in our latest, Issue 63.1. Williamson – “The Mole, the Sweet Potato, and the Possibility of Allegory” Alan Shapiro has published numerous books of poetry, most recently, Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin, 2012), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and just three days ago was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. A Professor of English and Creative Writing at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1995, he has received the Kingsley Tufts Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, and has been a finalist in both poetry and nonfiction for the National Books Critics Circle Award. His poem “The Host,” which was the opening piece in The Courtesy (The University of Chicago Press, 1983), was first published in CQ 35.1 (Fall 1982). We decided it was time to catch up with him again to discuss 3 a.m. epiphanies, the wisdom of Stephen Wright, and the importance of vaccination. This interview was conducted via email during the month of February. –Nathan Vail, Intern Carolina Quarterly (CQ): In Night of the Republic, you seem very interested in private reactions to public spaces. How would you explain this preoccupation? What sparked it? Alan Shapiro (AS): Several years ago I found myself in a supermarket at 3 a.m. The place was brightly lit and no one was there but a cashier who was half asleep, and I thought what a strange place this is, a place I go to nearly every day and yet never really look at or think about, and the absence of people made it possible for me to see how truly weird it is, as if I were an anthropologist from Mars and was trying to infer from the look of the place the nature of the creatures that had built it. From there it was a natural step to examine other public places at night to see what secrets they’d yield about our way of life. In honor of National Poetry Month, The Carolina Quarterly launched a contest to display the poetic talents in Orange County, North Carolina on all Chapel Hill Transit buses. To do so, we ran a poetry contest open to all students at UNC-Chapel Hill and residents of Orange County. We received a number of wonderful submissions and left the unenviable task of selecting the winners to contest judge Rachel Richardson The winners are as follows: $50 Grand Prize Winner: Honorable Mentions: Each Chapel Hill Transit bus will feature two poems throughout the month of April. Lauren’s poem will appear on all 98 CHT buses, while the Honorable Mentions will be randomly distributed amongst the buses. The posters go out on MONDAY APRIL 1, so keep an eye out for them. Thanks to everyone who submitted poems, and to Rachel Richardson for judging. Immense thanks to Assistant Editors Bhumi Dalia and Heather Van Wallendael for publicizing and successfully implementing the contest. Thanks also to Assistant Transit Director Brian Litchfield of Chapel Hill Transit for helping us to get poetry onto the buses. You can take a look at the posters here: Stuart Nadler’s writing touches on the core American themes: vast geography, wealth, racism, individual rights, and baseball. He is the author of Wise Men, a sweeping tale of a family’s rise to fortune and the complications it creates, and the story collection The Book of Life. Nadler has been honored with the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an all-around nice guy. Nadler’s first novel, Wise Men, was published in February to great acclaim. The Boston Globe found it “genuinely moving,” while People Magazine called it “A historical novel with the gusto of Gatsby.” To read his story, “Airplanes,” check out the Fall 2012 issue of CQ. The Carolina Quarterly recently talked with Nadler about looking at pictures of old Cadillacs, Cape Cod National Seashore, and what it’s like to create a town. –Nate Young, Fiction Staff Carolina Quarterly (CQ): You were recently selected for “5 under 35″ by the National Book Foundation for The Book of Life. What does that honor mean for you? Stuart Nadler (SN): It was a great honor and utterly humbling, especially having been picked by Edith Pearlman, a writer whose work I love and admire—and a Bostonian! And I was especially glad to be part of such a terrific group of writers. CQ: Your new novel, Wise Men, seems to be very concerned with geography: Cape Cod; New Haven, Connecticut; suburban New York; and rural Iowa, among other places. Do you have any connection to these locations yourself? SN: I don’t have any particular connection to New Haven, apart from having driven through it for years when going back and forth between Boston and New York. I have, though, lived in Iowa, which is where I went to graduate school, and for the past few years I’ve been spending time in the summers out on the far arm of Cape Cod. It’s an area of the country I love, and one that everyone, at some point, needs to see. President Kennedy made this far edge of the Cape into a National Park (The National Seashore) and so it’s been left alone, and because of that it’s completely empty of all the kinds of beachy bric-a-brac and resort hotels and boardwalk amusements that you find up and down the east coast. Instead you have the trees and the spot ponds and the whole coast, unadorned and beautiful. We recently asked CQ contributor Lauri Anderson to record a selection from her story, “Here Come the Carnivores,” featured in CQ 62.1. Lauri Anderson’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Willow Springs, Meridian, The Greensboro Review, Bellingham Review, Passages North, and on air at NPR’s “All Things Considered” Weekend. She is the recent winner of both the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, as well as The Robert Watson Literary Prize. She lives in Lubbock, Texas, where she is a PhD student at Texas Tech University. Take a listen: You can download the mp3 here: http://localhost:8888/cqonline/wp-content/uploads//2013/03/Anderson_Here_Come_the_Carnivores.mp3 |
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