SNS | 04-29-23
Featuring: Linda Ravenswood
& Jeannine Hall Gailey
Theme: Hybrid
Hosted By: Hollie Hardy
Saturday April 29, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)
Online Event
Free Admission
April Writing Prompt:
Happy National Poetry Month! Your free April SNS Writing Prompt is “HYBRID.”
This word simply means combining or mixing two different things to make something new, and applies to a vast range of topics from ligers and tigons and unicorns and animal-headed humans, to hybrid cars and GMOs and pink-lady-cherry-lemon trees, and coffee-quinoa cocktails (ew, what? no.), to the pandemic adaptions of hybrid work and learning environments, to hybrid cultures experienced by some immigrant and interracial families.
Another example of hybridity is the portmanteau—mash-up words like “brunch” and “spork” and “mockumentary.”
In terms of literature, there are many hybrid forms—mixed-medium and mixed-genre creations—letter and collage poems, ekphrasis, collaborative art/dance/writing projects, poems or stories incorporating multiple languages, maps, music, lists, diagrams, photographs, or other visual or sensory elements, or combining old and new, traditional and experimental forms, like broken sonnets, or Jericho Brown’s duplex form, anything that straddles the line between poetry and prose, like flash fiction and prose poetry, or any 2-thing-mashup!
Your invitation: Get creative! Be experimental! Mix and “mash” things together. Write about something hybrid. Or write/create something hybrid.
FOR INSPIRATION:
Here’s a sample from “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel” hybrid poems by Eduardo C. Corral, from his collection Guillotine.
Here’s a duplex by Jericho Brown, from his Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection, The Tradition.
NOTE: No Write-In this month. (I’m going on a much-needed vacation!) But I’ll be back to host SNS and we can write together again next month.
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Passcode: 483253
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Author Bios
LINDA RAVENSWOOD is an award-winning poet, performance artist, and founding Editor-in-Chief of The Los Angeles Press. She a winner of the Oxford Poetry Prize, the Edwin Markham Poetry Prize selected by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and the 2023 Arthur Smith Prize from Madville Press. Her hybrid poetry collection Cantadora – Letters from California was released in January 2023 from Eyewear London/Black Spring Press Group. Other current and forthcoming publications include The Stan Poems (Pedestrian Press, 2022), A Poem Is a House (forthcoming from Flowersong Press 2023), The 500 – The End of Conquest (Alternating Currents Press, 2024), and If We Never Meet Again: A Pandemic Diary (X Artists’ Books, 2024). Ravenswood is also the founder of the poet laureate program in Glendale, California and introduces the Poets Café on KPFK in LA on Wednesdays at 2:00p.m. Find her at The Los Angeles Press www.thelosangelespress.com
Buy Cantadora —Letters from California here: https://www.amazon.com/Cantadora-Letters-California-Linda-Ravenswood/dp/1913606244
Jeannine Hall Gailey is a writer with MS who served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and is the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize, Field Guide to the End of the World, and the newly released Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Ploughshares.
Find her at: https://webbish6.com/
Get a signed copy of Flare Corona here: https://webbish6.com/books/flare-corona/