WEALTH OF IDEAS

Presents AND A 2-day event featuring 33 poets reading from Sacramento Voices (Cold River Press) T his brand new anthology based on the Foam at the Mouth reading series held at the SacPoetry Center has many of the best our area has to offer; Here is the schedule for the Saturday afternoon and following Monday night readings: 11:00 a.m. - Phillip Larrea, Katy Brown, Wendy Williams, Kara Synhorst, Tom Goff. 12:00 - Geoffrey Neill, Sean King, JoAnn Anglin, Poet Michael Ellis, David Iribarne, Gene Avery. 1:00 - Shawn Aveningo, Lytton Bell, Martha Kight, Nancy Aidé Gonzalez, Evan Myquest, John Bell 2:00 - Emmanuel Sigauke, J.T. Odochartaigh, Sherri Goldberg, Laura Martin, Deborah Meltvedt, Concepcion Tadeo 3:00 - Karin Erickson, Linda Jackson Collins, Jan Haag, Bob Stanley, Tim Kahl

Okay, I will do a new post, to keep this space active. New post, not a post in the new cabinet. No, no. But a post, something beyond the kinds of posts people often talk about when they say post. There is post as in post office: that  I can work with--I carry stamps in my wallet always. I used to post a lot of manuscripts to journals, and they would require a SASE in order to post back the responses. And if they indeed posted something back to me, it was likely to be a rejection, because for submissions, the good news often comes as a phone call, and lately, via email. I don't post manuscrupts by snail mail  anymore. I only email, or upload it in their dropbox, and they still post when they respond, they often post a standard rejection, which then generates an email. I don't like this type of post, which deals with letters or manuscripts. Lamp post. There are no lamp posts in Mototi, but a few homes glow at night--two or three homes that have electricity, and the owners are p

The announcement just came in. "We Need New Names" by NoViolet Bulawayo, is now on the Booker Prize Shortlist. The list is strong and diverse. We Need New Names  by NoViolet Bulawayo  (Chatto & Windus) The Luminaries  by Eleanor Catton (Granta) The Harvest  by Jim Crace  (Picador) The Lowland  by Jhumpa Lahiri  (Bloomsbury) A Tale for the Time Being  by Ruth Ozeki  (Canongate) The Testament of Mary  by Colm Tóibín  (Penguin) "The six books on the list could not be more diverse. There are examples from novelists from New Zealand, England, Canada, Ireland and Zimbabwe – each with its own highly distinctive taste. They range in size from the 832 pages of Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries to the 104-page The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín. The times represented stretch from the biblical Middle East (Tóibín) to contemporary Zimbabwe (NoViolet Bulawayo) by way of 19th-century New Zealand (Catton), 1960s India (Jumpha Lahiri), 18th-century rural England

  Presents Unbarred Words: Works of the Incarcerated Writers from Folsom Prison with Bob Stanley, Traci Gourdine, Sean King, Alexa Mergen, Lawrence Dinkins, Nancy Gonzalez, Graciela Ramirez, Minerva Daniel, and Martha Garcia, and JoAnn Anglin    Monday, Sept. 9 at 7:30 PM 1719 25th Street at SPC Host: Emmanuel Sigauke    Rolling Shadow,  by Carlos   My father’s like a shadow that you can never use for shade. Hotter than hell in July, attempting to catch it, but it keeps running away.   My father’s like a rolling stone, rolling on down the hill, past the home. Picking up speed as it goes, so watch it go, and go alone.   Just like a shadow that you can never grasp, but always around Until dusk, when the sun goes down.   He watched a woman raise his three boys while he stayed away, So I was left playing soccer by myself day after day.   When he finally showed up, my anger and disappointment went away. He came bearing gifts, bags of chips, bottles of Yoo-Hoo

When I started this blog, I used to say many things about Zimbabwean literature, about African writers, about everything to do with writing. I loved predictions: I would see a new name and predict it would be the biggest name in African or world literature. Then I would do book reviews, write musings, and even type some poetry on this blog. I was having fun, I was using this space as a wealth of ideas harvested from cybespace, from the world of African literature, from interacting with poets in Sacramento, from reading old and new books. But I loved the idea of following new developments in literature, especially African literature. I wanted this to be a voice for the literature, an outlet for the energy I felt, the confidence I had in the literature, a voice crying on behalf of the literature, to tell the world that a literature was booming, a literature was doing its thing, this literature needed to be read, to be noticed, to be available in U.S. bookstores. Then something happened