Zavatsky awarded MacDowell Fellowship

upstreet poet Bill Zavatsky has been awarded a Fellowship by the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH, for the second summer in a row. He will spend five weeks during June and July at MacDowell, which is the oldest artists’colony in the United States.

Bill Zavatsky’s work appeared in the second and third issues of upstreet and will appear in the upcoming fourth issue. He holds BA and MFA degrees from Columbia University and has published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Where X Marks the Spot (Hanging Loose, 2006). A poem that appears in that collection and also in upstreet number two, “Live at the Village Vanguard,” received a Special Mention in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology. A longtime jazz pianist, he has written poems for CDs by Bill Evans and Marc Copland. He has also published translations of several French poets, including (with Ron Padgett) The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth, by Valery Larbaud, which will be reissued this year by Black Widow Press of Boston. Bill lives in New York City and teaches English at The Trinity School. Earlier this year he was named a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

Harrison is runner-up for Poets’ Prize

upstreet poet Jeffrey Harrison's fourth collection, Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way, 2006), is one of two runners-up for the Poets’ Prize, awarded annually by a peer jury of poets and administered by the West Chester University Poetry Center. The 2008 prize was won by A.E. Stallings for Hapax, and the other finalist was The Queen’s Desertion, by Carol Frost. Jeffrey will read from his work at the awards ceremony, which will take place at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York City, on Thursday 22 May at 7pm.

Two of Jeffrey Harrison’s poems, “Temporary Blindness” and “Bed Trouble,” are in upstreet number three. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, The New Republic, Poets of the New Century, and many other magazines and anthologies. His previous published collections are The Singing Underneath (selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, 1988), Signs of Arrival (1996), Feeding the Fire (Sarabande, 2001), and The Names of Things (Waywiser, 2006). His chapbook, An Undertaking, was published by Haven Street Press in 2005. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Jeffrey has taught at several universities and schools, including George Washington University, Phillips Academy, where he was the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence, and College of the Holy Cross. He is currently on the Faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine.

Sexton poems in O! Magazine, Poetry Daily

“Night. Fire,” a poem from Causeway (New Issues), the new poetry collection by Elaine Sexton, will be featured on Poetry Daily April 27. Another poem from Causeway, “Heaven,” appears in the May issue of O! the Oprah Magazine. Elaine’s book is described this way by Eamon Grennan: “Lodged in various locales, whether urban or rural, earthbound or on the open sea, answering a landscape, a family memory, or the vagaries of love, the poems of Causeway are always informed by an honest buoyancy of spirit.”

Two of Elaine’s poems were in upstreet number three: “What He Carried,” which appears in Causeway, and “Seaside Pastoral.” A third poem, “Tack,” will appear in upstreet number four. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, ARTnews, Art in America, Bloom, Hunger Mountain, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and the Lambda Book Report. She teaches a poetry workshop with a special focus on the chapbook for The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, and a few years ago started the website chapbookfinder.com. Elaine is the author of an earlier poetry collection, Sleuth (New Issues, 2003). She lives in New York City, where she works as a publisher of special-interest magazines.

Elaine will read her work on May 4 (along with upstreet Poetry Editor Jessica Greenbaum and others) in the Bellevue Hospital Rotunda, New York, on May 14 at Bird & Beckett Books in San Francisco, on May 27 at Bluestockings in New York , and on June 6 at RiverRun in Portsmouth, NH.

Randall Brown wins chapbook contest

Randall Brown, whose (very) short story, “Patterns,” will appear in upstreet number four, has won the 2007 chapbook contest conducted by Flume Press, a small press affiliated with the literary editing and creative writing programs at California State University, Chico. His short-short story collection, Mad to Live, will become the latest book in the Flume Chapbook Series, and will be released in August or September of this year.

The aim of Flume Press is to give newer writers exposure that can help them achieve deserved recognition. They publish one book a year, with a print run of 500 copies, and try to get the book to reviewers, literary magazine and small press editors, and other readers interested in contemporary poetry and fiction. Flume began in 1984 as an independent poetry publisher, and since then has released 18 poetry chapbooks. In 2003, they launched their first fiction chapbook contest, the winner of which was Sherrie Flick’s I Call This Flirting, which Randall says was “…a big influence on my writing short shorts.”

Randall Brown teaches at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He holds a BA from Tufts and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he studied with authors such as Nance Van Winckel, Abby Frucht, Pamela Painter, and Douglas Glover. He was formerly an editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, an online literary magazine dedicated to flash fiction. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Evansville Review, The Laurel Review, Dalhousie Review, and others. You may visit Randall at his blog.

Poem-A-Day to feature Karen Chase poem

To celebrate National Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets will send out one new poem each day in April to those who subscribe to its Poem-A-Day e-mail service. Poems have been selected from new books published this spring. The poem for Sunday, April 13, will be “Jam,” from BEAR, the forthcoming book by Karen Chase, which will be out in May. Two poems from BEAR, “The Hint” and “Ursa Major,” will be in upstreet number four.

upstreet poet is Guggenheim Fellow

Poet Bill Zavatsky, whose work has appeared in the second and third issues of upstreet and will appear in the upcoming fourth issue, has been awarded a 2008 Fellowship in Poetry by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded, on a competitive basis, to enable advanced professionals in the sciences, humanities, and creative arts to pursue research or creative work of their choice.

Bill Zavatsky grew up in Bridgeport, CT, and holds BA and MFA degrees from Columbia University. He has worked as a journalist and published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Where X Marks the Spot (Hanging Loose, 2006). A poem that appears in that collection and also in upstreet number two, "Live at the Village Vanguard," received a Special Mention in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology. A longtime jazz pianist, he has written poems for CDs by Bill Evans and Marc Copland. He has also published translations of several French poets, including (with Ron Padgett) The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth, by Valery Larbaud, which will be reissued this year by Black Widow Press of Boston. He lives in New York City and teaches English at The Trinity School.

Photo by Margaretta K. Mitchell