Station to Station, Poet to Poet! For the Plume 9 anthology, Danny Lawless, editor of Plume, enlisted forty-nine guest editors, who offered a poem of their own, then selected, introduced and presented a poem from another poet. With this series, we bring you these pairings for a multi-session Spring celebration of poetry. Join our editors at Plume for the final session of the series. This session is moderated by Plume editor Amanda Newell. Plume 9 is available here.
Session 5
Moderated by Amanda Newell
Featuring
Elena Karina Byrne & Lois P. Jones
Yusef Komunyakaa & Laren McClung
Elena Karina Byrne is a freelance lecturer, editor, Poetry Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club. She is former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America. In 2018 she completed her three years as one of the final judges for the Kate & Kingsley Tufts Awards in Poetry, and in 2019, her term for the Georgia Poetry Circuit. The author of five books including If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn Publishing, 2021) and NO, DON’T (What Books Press, 2020). She is currently enrolled in Antioch University Santa Barbara’s MFA program in Writing & Contemporary Media, and as a part of this interdisciplinary adventure, Elena is writing screenplays and fiction while completing a book of “interrupted” essays: Voyeur Hour: Poetry, Art, Film & Desire. A Pushcart Prize recipient, her publications include the Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Paris Review, Verse Daily, BOMB, Persea Books’ The Eloquent Poem, The Kyoto Journal, Poetry International, and New American Writing.
Lois P. Jones’s first collection, Night Ladder, was published in 2017 with awards for her work including the Lascaux Poetry Prize, the Bristol Poetry Prize judged by Liz Berry and the Tiferet Poetry Prize. Jones has work published or forthcoming in Guernica Editions (2021), New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust (Vallentine Mitchell of London), Narrative, Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly and American Poetry Journal.
Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Warhorses, Emperor of Water Clocks, and Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (forthcoming from FSG). His honors include the William Faulkner Prize (Université Rennes, France), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art and libretti have been performed internationally and include Saturnalia, Wakonda’s Dream, Testimony, and Gilgamesh. He served as the New York State Poet 2016-2018.
Laren McClung is the author of a collection of poems, Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow Press), and editor of the anthology Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (W.W. Norton). Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Poetry, Yale Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at New York University.
Moderators for this series
Amanda Newell’s first full-length poetry collection, Postmortem Say, is forthcoming from Červená Barva Press in 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook, Fractured Light (Broadkill Press, 2010), and her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Gargoyle, Rattle, Scoundrel Time, SWWIM, and elsewhere. The former English chair at The Gunston School (Centreville, MD), she has also taught at the University of Paris (Créteil) and Frostburg State University. She is Associate Editor for Special Features and Social Media at Plume.
Nancy Mitchell, Associate Editor of Plume Poetry, is the author of The Near Surround, Grief Hut and The Out-of-Body Shop and, with Danny Lawless, co-edited Plume Interviews I. A Pushcart Prize recipient, she is the Poet Laureate of Salisbury, Maryland and hosts the Poets on the Plaza Reading Series, currently on Zoom.
Leeya Mehta is Associate Editor at Large, Plume Poetry. She is a prize-winning poet & fiction writer. She is the author of A Story of the World Before the Fence and The Towers of Silence. She writes column on the reading and writing life: The Company We Keep. Discover her latest work here: leeyamehta.com