Now Available: Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching


I am thrilled to announce that Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching, a collection of essays by talented women poets that I helped co-edit with Carol Smallwood and Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, is ready for ordering from McFarland! (Amazon currently reads as out of stock, we're working on fixing that.)

With a foreword by inimitable sonneteer and novelist Molly Peacock, and contributions from state poets laureate, Pushcart Prize nominees and winners, professors, workshop leaders, editors, and publishers, my hope is that this collection will have something for everyone. There are chapters for busy moms, chapters on using meter, chapters on publishing, blogging, promotion, journaling, contests, self-publishing, and more. You can see the entire table of contents here.

I learned an incredible amount while working with Carol and Cynthia on this collection. I learned about the difficulties of soliciting work by email only (and have slightly more sympathy for editors who only accept hard copy submissions). I learned more about soliciting permissions for lyrics and poetry from other publishers than I could have ever hoped to know-and what I did learn leads me to grave concerns about whether or not poets understand how hard it is for someone to quote and cite their work without prohibitive cost. I learned about copyediting, the ultimate pain in the ass that MS Word can be when you are pasting in multiple documents and need everything formatted just so, and that few people follow citation instructions *grin*

All in all, it was enlightening. And we have a fantastic book as a final product!

This experience has given me the courage to go ahead and take a stab at an edited collection I've been considering since I was working on my critical MFA thesis back in 2009. And so, I've written up a CFP for Mythology and Modern Women Poets: Analysis, Reflection and Teaching. Here's hoping there are others who share my obsession --ah, I mean research and teaching interests-- in the topic!

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