Alan W. King's Blog

(PHOTO: Melanie Taub/NPR) What’s exciting about National Poetry Month is this series NPR is doing called Muses and Metaphors. Last month, NPR’s Producer Argin Hutchins and Senior Producer Davar Ardalan reached out to the DC Creative Writing Workshop to participate in this month’s Muses and Metaphors. I tweeted lines from poems written by two of the Workshop’s writing club members, TyJuan Hogan and Daisha Wilson. I also tweeted, at the request of Argin and Davar, lines from my poem. Argin came...

(PHOTO: stfudii) “YOU LOOK GOOD,” the guy tells the woman. They’re standing behind a teacher in a coffee shop where the audio selection shifts from jazz to acoustic world music to blue grass, then back to jazz. Grounded coffee beans claim the space with their fragrant presence. The guy has close-cropped white hair. He’s wearing a gray sports blazer over tan khaki pants. He’s much older than the woman, who’s dressed as if she’s heading toward the gym or as if she’s just finished jogging and...

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today, the weather was so good, I took my poetry students (only two showed up for class) out to Wisconsin Avenue NW in DC’s Georgetown. Their assignment was to people watch, observe how strangers interacted with one another. The students were supposed to also observe the strangers’ body language, and then create a flash fiction story. I took part in the exercise and wrote the story below. (PHOTO: Peter Dworin/ NYTimes) A BIKE MESSENGER WHIZZES BY, running late for a delivery...

Farmington, MA: Alice James Books, 2012. 78 pages. $15.95. (ARTWORK: Krista Franklin) The world continues to remember Nina Simone (formerly Eunice Kathleen Waymon) as a storyteller through songs, whose body of work created a legacy of compassion, empowerment and liberation. At the time of Simone’s death on April 21, 2003, she was already among the 20th century’s most extraordinary artists. But, to poet Monica Hand, this song griot was something else. Reading Hand’s poems, it’s clear that Nina...

(PHOTO: Tidal Basin Review) Click the artwork to view larger image. If you’re like me, you probably wondered what brought on the unseasonably warm weather a couple of weeks ago. And, like me, you’ll see the cause of that was the scorching new issue of Tidal Basin Review (TBR). I’m honored to have some work alongside writers who get down on this issue’s theme of beauty. In his poem “Essence And Object,” Kyle Dargan ’s speaker, looking back on his childhood, is talking to his lover about the...

(PHOTO: JJG3 Photography) Duke Ellington's students in the Literary Media and Communications Department As part of the art faculty at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, my students and I created the school’s first-ever digital poetry anthology that represents the students in the Literary Media and Communications Department. Here’s an excerpt from my introduction: The online anthology derived its name from the famed print anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, which has a range...

(PHOTO: Andrew Councill/ Washington Post) That’s right! Lauren Wilcox, the Washington Post Magazine reporter, came through the DC Creative Writing Workshop and interviewed me, the program’s Exec. Dir. Nancy Schwalb, and our students. It was a great time! Here’s an excerpt from that article: On a recent weekday in Frances Harrington’s classroom at Hart Middle School in Anacostia, there was a steady volley of balled-up wads of paper into the corner trash cans and a constant mid-level clamor...

(PHOTO: Alan King) Click photo to enlarge. During his discussion Thursday, Indigo Moor had a question for his fellow Stonecoast grad students. “How many harmonica players does it take to screw in a light bulb?” He looked around at the puzzled expressions of writers straining their brains to figure out the punch line. Then everyone laughed when Indigo quoted a harmonica player: “We don’t worry about the changes, man. We just blow.” His advice to his peers, looking to write in multiple genres,...

(PHOTO: Stock) Cait Johnson raised some eyebrows and made a roomful of writers blushed when she talked about orgasms. According to Cait, a Stonecoast faculty, the best orgasms happen when two people are vulnerable and intimate with each other. To hear her tell it, that same intensity’s achieved when writers engage in other genres. Cait’s wise words resonated with both students and colleagues during her presentation Passionate Bedfellows: What Poets and CNF [Creative Nonfiction] Writers Offer...

(PHOTO: Nancy Bratton Design) I don’t know about the other attendees, but I’m still swooning from Jan Beatty’s reading at Split This Rock 2010. That year marked the second time for the biennial literary festival that Sarah Browning started as a way of providing a “permanent home for progressive poets.” Since it started in 2008, Split This Rock has attracted high-profile participants such as Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Dennis Brutus, Mark Doty, Carolyn Forche, and Sharon Olds. The...

Order your copies today! Drift (Willow Books, 2012) is now available for pre-order at http://bit.ly/rs0aiK Advanced Praise for Drift : “Tender and tough, the poems in Alan King’s wonderful debut book of poems, Drift, reveal the cities of memory, love and friendship with the precise and caring eye of a poet deeply invested in the lives of those around him.” –Ching-in Chen, author of The Heart’s Traffic “Alan King’s first collection is aptly named. The pictorial poems he posits drift between tw

(PHOTO: Erin Patrice O'Brien) Major Jackson<br />The speakers in both <a title="major" href="http://www.majorjackson.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Major Jackson</a>’s 11-part poem “Urban Renewal” (from <em>Leaving Saturn</em>) and <a title="audre" href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/306" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Audre Lorde</a>’s <em>Coal</em> are both city dwellers coming to terms with the changing landscape. They fear possibly being displaced and mourn the once familiar structures city officials left “crumbling to gutted relics.”<a title="" href="#_ftn1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">[1]</a><br />The speakers aren’t alone in their suffering. “A chorus of power lines/ hums a melancholic hum,” while the “sun dreams the crowns of trees behind skyscrapers.”<a title="" href="#_ftn2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">[2]</a> And, though the long-term effects of displacement are just as unsettling, </a title="major" href="http://www.majorjackson.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">

(PHOTO: Alan King) l-r: Derrick Weston Brown, Evie Shockley, Iain Haley Pollock, and Khadijah Queen. The panel of poets at a Baltimore City Library quietly considered an audience member’s question: “When did you know you were a poet?” Evie Shockley, a presenter, smiled as the response brewed in her mind. She’d been asking herself the same thing until she took a poetry workshop led by Lucille Clifton. If you wrote a poem, then you’re a poet, Shockley recalled the late-poet saying. “Own it an

Full Disclosure: I’m the senior program director at the DC Creative Writing Workshop. I covered the award ceremony where Bank of America honored our executive director, and I wanted to share it here. Congrats again Nancy! (PHOTO: Abbey Chung) Young-Writer-in-Residence Renita Williams, Executive Director Nancy Schwalb, and Board Chair Dr. John Cotman in their militant stand against the cold, wet weather of that evening. With two young people from her program, Nancy Schwalb approached the...

(PHOTO: Courtesy) Vicky Leyva The dancers in amaranth and aqua-blue flamenco dresses startled the crowd when they dashed down the aisle of chairs on the Sub Level 1 floor of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Following them, a boy in his aqua-blue top, amaranth waist-tie and black pants shuffle-stepped among the dancers—his arms outstretched as if he were mimicking the movements of a plane. These dancers were a highlight of an Afro-Peruvian Rhythms and Dance performance the...