Natasha Trethewey discussed her motivations for writing about history and social justice on February 3 in Atlanta, and the video is now up, including a discussion of one of my own poems (around the 35-minute mark).

Wendy S. Walters is guest-blogging on Ruth Ellen Kocher's channel About A Word, starting with an intriguing entry that reminds me again (as if I need to be reminded), why I'm drawn back to Wendy's work again and again.

Lately I spend a lot of time trying to locate the geography of the work. I believe the writing is someplace. While always true, facts of location are always temporary. And while current events seem to confirm this point for me over and over, somehow I still go out to try and find the line. Whether this is a problem with poetry or a problem with me matters less, I think, than the mistake of not feeling how much wildness is naturally occurring wherever it is the search for the poem takes me.

I should have tattooed on me somewhere a line from Wendy's Birds of Los Angeles: "I am addicted to places..."

My poem "Before Knowing Remembers" was selected by David Wojahn for the Third Coast Poetry Prize. You'll see it in Third Coast in the Fall and also in the pages of Persons Unknown.

We went out to see Super-Relative, a collaborative show featuring work by Samuel Schimek and Andrew Novick, last night at the Lisa Kowalski gallery, and all I can say is that there is, obviously, some photographic evidence of the fun...

Representing Copper Nickel, I'll join Harrison Fletcher of upstreet, Stephanie G'Schwind of Colorado Review, and Roger Wehling of Wazee, as we discuss how submissions make it into our journals in a discussion presented by The Lighthouse Writers Workshops on Saturday, April 24, at 10:00 am at Tattered Cover LoDo.

Here's the description direct from The Lighthouse: What does it take to get published in literary journals? Hear directly from editors at three distinguished journals: as they walk you along the path of a successful submission.

Maybe you already saw this, but Denver Post music critic Ricardo Baca is thinking about the convention of selling naming rights, and he asked me what I thought:

But the relationship that works for the sponsor doesn't always make sense to the consumer, observed University of Colorado Denver poet and professor Jake Adam York.

"The people who think basketball and office products belong together, and football and insurance should coexist, they aren't living in the same world we're living in," said York. "If we had a buyer, we'd surely become the Coors University of Colorado, and that would help us out with our financial responsibilities, I'm sure.

"But it feels intrusive when people feel like they can put down a couple million dollars in exchange for their name on something."

I've been thinking about this for a while, addressing the website and the blog seriously again. It's been probably two years, maybe more, since I really enjoyed and maintained this, and I've been feeling drawn back to this work again of late.

But to return, I'd have to start again, new, fresh—succeed in some of the work I always intended to do, try some new things, but most importantly of all return to the real work of the site and the blog, to transmit something again, but this time with whole new kinds of static.

So here it is, 2010, and you, reader, whoever you are: a return and a renewal, with more changes ahead, but certainly a stable and active web presence again.

My third book of poems, Persons Unknown is scheduled for publication by Southern Illinois University Press in October 2010....

I'll be reading at the Library of Virginia in Richmond on Wednesday, March 3rd as part of the Fresh Ink Reading series.

Here is the official press release for the event:

2010 Series Kicks Off with Poets Jake Adam York and Kathleen Graber

RICHMOND, VA - The Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Blackbird/New Virginia Review, the Library of Virginia and Chop Suey Books present the first installment in the 2010 Fresh Ink literary series on Wednesday, March 3. The on-going series of readings by emerging authors continues with a chapbook festival and a fiction reading later in the year. Poets Jake Adam York and Kathleen Graber read from their work beginning at 6 p.m. at the Library of Virginia. The reading is free and open to the public.

Jake Adam York is the author of three books of poems: Murder Ballads (2005); A Murmuration of Starlings (2008); and Persons Unknown (2010), forthcoming in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry as an editor's selection. His work has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize and has placed in numerous competitions. York's poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals. His work of poetic history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, was published by Routledge in 2005. York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students. York is also a contributing editor for Shenandoah, a former editor of the online journal storySouth, and a founding editor of the electronic journal Thicket.

Kathleen Graber's first collection of poetry, Correspondence, was the winner of the 2005 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She was the 2007 Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton University and the 2008 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar. She is a member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, and her new collection of poems, The Eternal City, is forthcoming this summer from Princeton University Press. Poems from the new book are forthcoming this spring in Blackbird, The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, and AGNI.

Fresh Ink is supported in part by the Carole Weinstein Endowment for Creative Writing at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.

A poster anyone...?