Tag: literary community

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Submitting to Residencies: Thoughts & Resources

This year I have interacted with many writers who have asked about my experiences at artist/writer residencies. From curiosity to serious potential applicants, I noticed a trend in these encounters; physical tools were never exchanged. This realization led to creating an online space to work and field questions with writers interested in learning more about residencies.

At this time, I have worked within my BIPOC community as it creates a safe space for me to pilot this workshop. I consider this a way of learning as I do not know everything, and I acknowledge there are more qualified people than me. However, I also know that my knowledge can be helpful for those just starting to look into the application process.

I choose to work with a small group because I, as an attendee, have found smaller groups to be intimate and allows for more discussion. This is the reason my workshops are capped at a limited number of participants. While I could reach a larger audience at once I prefer to build community.

Time. If only we all had more time. There are many people who cannot attend my workshops and if there were two of me I’d probably be hosting workshops every day to help as many people as possible. Since I cannot split myself in two I did want to share some online resources (there aren’t many) I have found vital.

Alliance of Artists Communities
Transartists
Sustainable Arts Foundation
Literistic*

There aren’t that many resources out there. Google isn’t very helpful when it comes to research because it leads you to the same places over and over. I have found that the Alliance of Artists Communities is by far the most helpful as their database is extensive. While this is a great database it can also be time consuming when you sit down to research places. There are numerous residencies with unique qualities that there is absolutely no one-size fits all. The Transartists website focuses on more international residencies.

Make sure to research the places you’re interested in. Here are a few questions I ask myself when researching residencies.

How long are these residencies? A week? A month?
How many artists will be there at once? 10? 55?
Is food provided? Or will I need to buy my own?
Accommodations? Cabin? House?
What time of the year can I go? 
How will I get myself there?
What are the fees to attend?
What is the application fee?
Does it require a letter of recommendation or recommender contact information?

I hope you found this information insightful and helpful. Good luck with your applications if you decide to apply.

Amanda

*Some people use the Literistic email service. On top of literary journals to submit to, this group also includes residencies, fellowships, and grants. I do not subscribe to the long list ($5/a month — I believe) but I think I’m linked to the short list.

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Countdown to Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making Release Date

The official publication date for Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making :: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics is March 27, 2019!

This is such an exciting time for Luisa A. Igloria and for myself as the idea came about in the fall of 2016! Yes, 2016. From brainstorming to putting out the call for essays to reading and selecting the essays to working with a publisher to minor bumps to last minute revisions—it has taken us two years and some change to finally reach our publication date.

As of right now there’s still time to preorder over at The Operating System’s main website. The publication date does coincide with the AWP Conference (Association of Writers & Writing Programs). If you will be at AWP in Portland this year then the anthology will be available at the book fair in two locations: The Operating System’s table as well as the Old Dominion University’s table. If you spot me at the conference then I will also have copies of the anthology for sale.

Until then I want to highlight some of the wonderful people and poets involved in this anthology as it takes a village to bring these anthologies to life.

Many thanks to the following writers who have graciously blurbed our anthology:

“What an astonishing symphony of ‘desperate and beautiful noise’ the editors have assembled here! It feels unprecedented to me, and yet somehow also already indispensable. I will be teaching, and learning, from this anthology for years.”
~ Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Of Color assembles a remarkable chorus of voices, each distinct, powerful, and deeply moving on its own, but when taken together reflect the rich and complex soundscape of what it means to be a writer of color in America today. It’s a rare and wonderful thing to encounter a collection of essays which speak so honestly of the ways that grief, anxiety, gratitude, and love can bring us to the page and transform our language, our world, or even ourselves. “
~ Neil Aitken, author of The Lost Country of Sight and Babbage’s Dream

“There is a fierceness required or grown from having little choice but to be attentive. Like walking an uneven and dangerous path chock full of hidden or horizon-obliterating elements screaming quiet in their teeming to be witnessed. This is nothing less magic than the complex work-work of language itself, and in such crucial voicings, the ones offered right here. 

Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making :: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics is testimonial and music, memory and urgency and loss, fire and salve for what has been, for the troubled ongoing future. 

The authors, the stories their bodies and flesh carry, the memories they often contend with, brought together and beautifully curated by Luisa A. Igloria and Amanda Galvan Huynh, are no easy “we.” And yet I risk this: it is in gathering uneasy, willing ourselves into readiness, to share how hard or through what experimentations in contention we got here that we may find in the stories, in the work, waystones for the journey on. 

I want to quote all the essays in this unbroken promise of a book to you. Like being the first in the crew to, just this side of gushing, pop in a tape our body responses decide carries our next song for crossing bridges. Instead, I say I needed this book many years ago, and need it now. May you who finds this so often brilliant waystone of a book carry it to the places more of us can find it, too. ”
~ Hari Alluri, author of The Flayed City

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Nomination for Best New Poets 2019

Many thanks to Glass: A Journal of Poetry  for nominating “Only One of Us Can Breathe in Space” for the 2019 Best New Poets Anthology. I’m always humbled whenever my poems receive nominations, and I’m very grateful for the extra work that editors and their staff put into their journals and the support they give their contributors. Congratulations to Lauren Milici on her nomination as well!

To learn more about Glass and the work they do head on over to their website. If you are an avid reader then dive into their current issue or checking out their chapbook series. If you are a poet feel free to submit to their journal as they are wonderful to work with. To support these wonderful human beings and the work they do feel free to share their page, give them love, or buy one of their chapbooks.

For more information about Best New Poets you can check out their website as the open competition starts April 1 and ends May 15.

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Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making

March 2019 

by The Operating System

Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making

An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics

Amanda Galvan Huynh & Luisa A. Igloria, Editors

of color_full

Cover design by Elæ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson] with featured artwork by Suchitra Mattai.

As a faculty member and as a student, respectively; and as working poets of color in an MFA Creative Writing Program, we see the anxieties and pragmatic questions that students of color have, as they look for models and mentorship to support their experiences and histories. We hasten to add that faculty of color also experience the same kinds of fundamental unease: they seek to provide meaningful teaching while going through the rituals of academic tenure where they continually encounter the kinds of scrutiny that suggest, among other things, that their credentials and what they bring to the table are somehow wanting, even when they are not.

Especially in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential Election and its impact upon communities of color across the nation, we can expect that these kinds of conversations among writers of color will only deepen and intensify.

While we may not have answers to the current climate and rhetoric of social divisiveness and contention, we want to help put forth efforts toward building, in some areas where we can claim experience and agency: our stories, our voice.

Through this project, we gathered and consolidated some of the best essays that will speak to how and where we have come to poetry; and what we have learned about making and professing it, as poets of color, even in contexts which may have challenged our specific capacities to do so.

The anthology, which will be available in 2019, includes work by 15 wonderful poets, including Ocean Vuong, Craig Santos Perez, Sasha Pimentel, Ching-In Chen, Kenji Liu, Khadijah Queen, Tim Seibles, Abigail Licad, Addie Tsai, Remica L. Bingham-Risher, Wendy A. Gaudin, Melissa Coss Aquino, Tony Robles, Ernesto Abeytia, and José Angel Araguz.

For updates check on our Facebook page: Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making

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New Poem in Whurk

Excited to have “Notes on Absence” published in Whurk’s Issue 50! I’m also equally excited and touched by Paul Hostetler’s accompanying illustration.

I told my partner, “It’s me. It’s my family.” A reminder that I’m not used to seeing myself, brown hair/Latinx features, in art. Such a true blessing. 

Thank you to Whurk’s Staff! Show them love and support at whurk.com!

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