Hey poets — this bulletin is late, because I’ve been spending time with family, walking in the woods with my dad, stopping for trilliums whenever we find them. We recently found out he has cancer, and the most honest thing I can say is that when he’s not well, I’m not well… We’re sorting out what this means in the near-term, and I’m listening for where …

After thousands of you voted in the Trump Haiku Contest Runoff, we have a winner! This TBR Contest Special newsletter features the winning poem, analysis of the voting, and an exclusive interview with the triumphant poet. Contestants were asked to submit haikus on this theme: “Trump’s innermost musings as he sits in court.”

Lately I’ve been reading the books of poet Kenneth Koch, an acclaimed writer who brought poetry into elementary schools in the 1960s. The lessons he created led to deeply imaginative poems. He shares them in his books ROSE, WHERE DID YOU GET THAT RED

Hello Friends, We hope you are having a great spring season filled with inspiration! Thank you for taking the time to read our newsletter—it’s filled with creative opportunities for you and your writing: our annual Online Poetry Retreat is back; award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield will join us for a Zoom conversation; our Chapbook Prize is accepting submissions; and we have just released a new book in our Wilder Prize Poetry Book Series!

A few quick notes to start: My new novel, Small Rain, is out on September 3. Please preorder it by asking at your local bookstore, or from your favorite online retailer. Here are a few links: Bookshop, Powells, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Amazon

Dear friends, Last weekend, staying in Maine during the Camden poetry festival, I was at a night party hosted by Mark, one of the festival’s founders (poet and translator too, including a new forthcoming translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus). It was a party for people, yes, but I was particularly delighted at how some people also brought their (gor…

Dear friends, Reading your interactions to the “Poems as Teachers: Conflict and the Human Condition” episodes this week has been an education too. Thank you for taking the time to engage, to write, to share from your lives — of the violences we contend with, the moments of change, the profound moments of deep disillusionment and unexpected about-turns o…

Hello everybody! All 318 of you!! A massive thank you for being a part of this new publication, I have really enjoyed exchanging messages with some of you over the past few weeks and it is a joy to be in the midst of so much poetry. I hope to carve out some time to get to know more of you and am really keen to hear your thoughts on the newsletter (th…

So, not a great week here for me in the old writing career. I had a publisher who was interested in my second (!) poetry collection of weird broken sonnets. I was thrilled! I got blurbs; there was cool cover art. All was well! Then the editor explained that he needed to make my lines fit to the formatting because he hates hanging indents when the line go…

Hey y’all, Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week: I am deep into writing at the moment and I keep repeating to myself: “It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now. It just needs to exist.” “Better stop short than fill to the brim,” says the

It’s a rare occasion when I sit down for an interview—I’ve only agreed to two video interviews in the last 18 months. (The previous one is here.) But this one is a milestone in other ways. First, it’s the longest interview I’ve ever given on camera—we kept going for more than two hours without a break.

Hello and welcome back to The Recovering Line Cook, the home for my recipes, personal stories, and essays on all things food. I just want to thank those of you who have upgraded to paid subscriptions recently. I am a restaurant cook who loves to write, I don’t have an agent in my corner or any of that business, and your financial support makes this proje…

A cat perches on a bare branch, arched as if to pounce – a menacing image on the cover of Susan Glickman’s latest collection of poetry, Cathedral/Grove. Against a black background the cat appears almost white and moonlit, while the bare branches contour the feral creature. Its feline limbs grasp parallel branches, while its trunk rests as if it were a n…

Hi friend, I have exciting news today! After months of alluding to my joint art exhibition with my mom, Anne Francey, I‘m thrilled to officially announce it: “The Alchemy of Blood” opens at ArtYard in Frenchtown, New Jersey, on June 22, 2024. If you read the description of the show you’ll see overlapping themes, in that both our works meditate on bodily …

In this, the land that prides itself on dreams, I have come to know intimately the duality of existence. To be a Black person in America is to live in a world where there are always two of everything. Two education systems, two corporate worlds, two housing markets, two legal systems—each pair reflecting the …

Do you have that one friend who gets all pissy when the small thing that only they like becomes just a little bit bigger and now, like, everybody likes it? Well, Colin is that way about Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown. He has finally grumpily agreed (with his children, with the Broadway-loving populace) that the big-time production of Anaïs Mitchell’s beauti…

There’s got to be some kind of formula or system that explains why sometimes when you search The Real Real, you are endowed the gift of great, reasonable finds that do not come with the labor of voracious surfing while other times it can feel like a desert.

Sweet Community, As National Poetry Month nears its end, I thought it would be the perfect time to share a very new (and very long) poem I wrote about befriending my mortality and the countless ways that process has increased the joy in my life. If you’ve been subscribed to

Cecily Brown, Rainy Day Women, 2007 dear bear, i recently graduated college and am faced with soul-crushing anxiety about jobs and career that i've been trying to keep at bay for the past few years. i'm infinitely lucky that i've found what i love to do (and am quite good at, i think?) but that just leaves me with anxiety about how to do the best i can i…

In September 2020, in the midst of a panic about Critical Race Theory (CRT) infiltrating the government and schools, former President Donald Trump issued an executive order. The executive order, however, does not take on CRT directly — or even…

Hi, Friend. I know it’s not technically summer until the solstice, but school’s out here today, and the pools are opening, and my neighbor’s strawberry patch is coming up beautifully, and I’m just ready. I’m ready—and anyway, I’ve never been one who cares about technicalities.

Subscriptions are 20% off through May 31. A preview of the most recent agent list can be accessed here.

If you’re like me and you’ve been tracking polling data on the 2024 election, you may be feeling a little unsettled. A couple caveats: This far in advance, polls have relatively little predictive power. Moreover, some of the polls putting Trump over Biden are still within the margin of error. Still, given

At age 25, working as a secretary for Doubleday, Judith Jones found the manuscript for The Diary of Anne Frank in the slush pile. Later, as an editor, she brought Julia Child and dozens of other cookbook authors to American audiences. She edited John Updike and Anne Tyler. She rejected Alice Munro — twice! She spent 57 years at Knopf, arguably the most …

Updated 22 May 2024: Find 128 Substacks focused on addiction recovery and sobriety below.