Posts Tagged: Ada Limón

From the Bayou City to the Northwoods

July 31, 2019, by

On traveling to a Midwest summer writing conference and remembering the literary community I come from

Writing in Solitude

I love to write at my desk and to write in my bed, my couch. It’s true that when it comes to writing, I prefer the privacy of being home. Here, I can walk freely in circles, talking to myself about the particular conflicts I’m working through in a novel. I know how to circumvent the coffee table and couch, the rug where my cat tends to stretch in the sun.

Don’t get me wrong: I certainly like to write in cafés and libraries, on the Metro—anywhere, really. I’ll take whatever time I can get! But there is something to be said about being able to recite aloud a draft without being concerned that someone beside me is trying to enjoy her newspaper or blueberry bagel, unruffled by my performance.

Writing at home is a luxury I don’t take lightly. Writing among a community of writers who also share a passion for your craft is yet another. This summer I was reminded of the privilege of not only being a writer, but of living in a community that values writing. Continue reading →

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A poetic night with Ada Limón and Gregory Pardlo

April 13, 2017, by

RM3_7535Last Monday, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series welcomed poets Ada Limón and Gregory Pardlo. The poets, former classmates at NYU, have both recently been recognized: Limón’s Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Pardlo won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for his collection Digest, and as of Thursday, a Guggenheim Fellowship. Poet Kevin Prufer, who also serves as a professor at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, moderated a discussion with both after the reading.

Limón opened with “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” in which she imagines the power of a race- winning filly’s 8-pound heart: “Don’t you want to tug my shirt and see / the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it’s going to come in first.” When Prufer asked after Limón’s performance of the piece, she referred to Frederico García Lorca’s duende, and the heightened expression embodiment can bring to the work. Many of Limón’s poems showcased the same, with lines like, “You wake some days / full of crow and shine,” and “[…] then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails […]” Continue reading →

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Five reasons not to miss Gregory Pardlo’s Inprint reading

April 1, 2017, by

Pardlo, Gregory Pardlo-author-photo photo by Rachel Eliza GriffithsAs we begin National Poetry Month today, Inprint presents Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gregory Pardlo Monday evening as part of the 2016/2017 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. Here are five we should all be excited to come out and hear him! 

“Song of Myself”

Not only does Pardlo have geographical ties to Whitman’s Brooklyn and New Jersey—he and his family live in Brooklyn and he attended university and teaches in Camden—but Pardlo’s work is often rooted in a formally expansive Whitmanesque poetic in terms of structure and content. When Pardlo writes in the much published poem “Written by Himself,” “I was born across the river where I/was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth,/broadsides sewn in my shoes,” one hears Whitman’s voice and walks through his same America. Continue reading →

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