Author Archives: Katie

Caffeine Corridor Reading Series

I’d been wanting to do a poetry reading in my hometown for a long time. I made contact with Phoenix poets and got a reading scheduled as part of my Tasty Other book tour, and I finally got to read at the Caffeine Corridor Reading Series on May 11!

It was so special to have several family members and friends in the audience.

I also loved meeting and hearing fellow reader Trish Justrish, the poets who performed at the open mic, and the reading series hosts: Shawnte Orion, Bill Campana, and Jack Evans. What a cool community of poets!

Thanks, Bill Campana, for your humor.

Thanks, Jack Evans, for your generous affirmation of my work.

Thanks, Shawnte Orion, for arranging for me to read at Caffeine Corridor and for declaring me the poet laureate of North Canyon High School. 🙂

Festival of Faith & Writing

Last month, I had a wonderful first time at the Festival of Faith & Writing in Grand Rapids!  (Even though I had to re-book my Sunday morning flight and get out on Saturday afternoon to escape an ice storm…) I especially loved spending time with writer friends on the plane ride there, over meals, in the hot tub, and at the One Poet, One Poem reading.

I got to present on a panel of literary journal editors called “Making Space: The Literary Journal as Witness” alongside Angela Doll Carlson (Saint Katherine Review), Nathaniel Lee Hansen (The Windhover), Daniel Bowman (Relief), and Brianna Van Dyke (Ruminate). I loved getting to represent Whale Road Review and talk about reading, writing, and editing with such wonderful company.

One of the very best parts for me was seeing my current and incoming PLNU colleagues present. Dean Nelson gave an excellent talk on interviewing (even at 8:30 in the morning), and Margarita Pintado gave a great poetry talk and reading.

Some of my other favorite sessions included a celebration of Luci Shaw and later an interview with her conducted by Madeleine L’Engle’s granddaughters, a poetry session on daughters writing mothers (with Barbara Crooker and Jeanne Murray Walker), and a session on using ancient texts (with Diane Glancy and Lauren Winner). l also loved the keynote by Edwidge Danticat, who was stunning when she read and talked about her book The Art of Death.

Another highlight for me: I was so impressed with Pádraig Ó Tuama, an Irish poet, who did an interview alongside Marie Howe and then gave a talk and reading on Friday. When I bought his book and went to his signing, I also gave him a copy of The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman because he’d talked a bit about the bleeding woman during his interview. I felt a bit like a silly fan giving him a copy of my book, but I did it anyway. When I was traveling home on Saturday, a friend texted me to say, “Did you SEE what Pádraig posted about your chapbook on Instagram?!”

This was a wonderful way to close my first trip to FFW. 🙂 I hope to be back!

5 Poems in Amethyst Review

In the chaos of traveling for conferences and ending the semester, I haven’t yet shared that 5 of my Bible project poems were published in Amethyst Review!

They split the poems into two batches (Old Testament and New Testament) and published them online on consecutive Fridays in April.

“The Book of Baa” and “The Book of Haze”

“The Book of What,” The Book of Sin,” and “The Book of Lips”

Many thanks to editor Sarah Law for choosing and publishing my poems!

Poets in Pajamas

I had so much fun being the guest poet on Poets in Pajamas on my birthday! I read a couple of favorite poems from each of my published collections, plus a couple of bonus brand new poems, and I answered questions from the live online audience. Thanks to all who tuned in and participated!

You can catch the video of my reading here: Poets in Pajamas 32: Katie Manning.

Poetry at the PCA

The week before Easter, I got to attend the annual Popular Culture Association national conference in Indianapolis. I love this conference. It’s the perfect mix of scholarship and fun, with participants inside and outside of academia. I can attend sessions on poetry and Doctor Who and games studies all in the same place. It’s glorious.

I’m the Area Chair of Poetry Studies & Creative Poetry, so I screen submissions and organize the poetry panels. It takes a chunk of time and doesn’t pay, but I love this work too. It’s a fun puzzle for me to figure out how to arrange the presentations into panels so they will speak to each other in interesting ways, and I love getting to connect with poets and poetry scholars by hosting them at this conference. I’ve met some wonderful people this way over the last four years, from undergraduate students presenting for the first time to well-established poets like Kaveh Akbar. (I was going to insert a photo, but I just took a ton of blurry photos from my crummy old phone, so just imagine a lot of people looking awesome. I’ll bring my good camera next year…)

This year, I got to present in a session called A Field Guide to Grief: Poems. Kira Dunton, Sally McGreevey Hannay, Sarah Ann Winn, and I read poems from our collections that deal with loss (of a friend, of a son, of grandparents). I wasn’t sure people would turn out for grief-based poetry, but the room filled up, and it was one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had. The audience was audibly and visibly connected with us. I saw people openly crying. The room rang with laughter in the moments when the poets’ dark humor came through. The Q&A time continued with audience members sharing very personally about their own losses and asking about when/how we’d come to write from grief. It was such a special time.

I also had the good fortune to be invited to take a side trip to South Bend on Good Friday to read with Sarah Ann Winn and Emily Capettini. Krista Cox of the Lit Literary Collective was a wonderful host. I loved hearing more of Sarah’s incredible poems from Alma Almanac, and I was so impressed with Emily’s Velma Dinkley flashes and Bloody Mary short story. Bonus features: talking and laughing with Sarah and Emily on the drive, seeing my cousin Toni who’s always lived halfway across the country from me, and eating delicious food with all of these people until the restaurant blasted loud music to make us leave at closing time.

I’m looking forward to the 2019 PCA conference in Washington, D.C.!

The Windhover & Mom Egg Review

The last couple of months have been full. The usual end-of-semester work would be enough, but I’ve also traveled to two conferences and mourned the deaths of two wonderful people, so it’s been hard to keep up with everything.

Celebrating success is important though, so here I am, taking a break from grading to write this post. I sent some poems out into the world, and someone read them and thought they were worth publishing. I always love the way poems connect me to other people.

My poem “The Book of Endings” from my biblical word banking project was published in The Windhover, 22.1.

My poem “Which Way Do You Want to Go?” from my collection about/to my late Granny (and also inspired by the best movie, The Labyrinth) was published in Mom Egg Review, vol. 16.

My poems are in incredible company in both of these journals. I highly recommend buying these issues, or better yet, subscribing! I’m so grateful for the work these editors are doing.

Review of Tasty Other

Thank you to Adam Stutz for this lovely and personally engaged review of Tasty Other.

“Tasty Other succeeds in capturing the marvelous absurdity of dreamscapes that emerge during pregnancy with witty and frank depictions of the excitement, trepidation, incongruity, and beauty of the mother and the baby within. She makes me stop to consider the omnipresence of my own mother, who passed away in 2011, and who still appears at times in complicated, bizarre, and silly dreams.”

You can read the whole review here.

The Light Ekphrastic

I have two poems in the new issue of The Light Ekphrastic! This online journal pairs a writer and visual artist together to create work in response to each other, which is such a fun and brilliant idea for a journal.

I created “How I Measure Your Body” in response to Carl Scharwath’s photograph “Spatio.” His photo prompted me to write about the different uses of the word “body,” something I’d been wanting to do in my project to/about my Granny, and his photo also gave me the four-box form for my poem. Then Carl sent a photo of Prague in response to “One Way to Use a Deck of Cards,” my poem about a honeymoon and marriage that does indeed mention photos from Prague.

Thanks to editor Jenny O’Grady, artist Carl Scharwath, and poetry champion Trish Hopkinson for introducing me to this journal.

January 2018, or “What’s All This? Step in Time!”

January was bizarre for me in many ways, but I’ll stick to poetry news in this post. Several pieces that were accepted throughout 2017 were published all at once this month. The first 3 journals even went live on the same day!

I ended the month with 21 poems appearing in 6 journals and 1 anthology. If I have nothing else published in 2018, I should still feel like this was a good publication year.

Online

“The Book of Am” in Ovenbird Poetry

“I Dream That I Secrete Honey” and “Scrabble with E.B. White” in Drunk Monkeys

5 pieces from 28,065 Nights in Qu:* “The First Day of Our Second Year Without You,” “How to Use Vanilla,” “I Was Afraid It Would Be Empty,” “After Your Strokes…,” and “Your Death Explained in Birds”

5 poems in Five:2:One: “The Book of On,” “The Book of Thirst,” “The Book of Seconds,” “The Book of Were,” and “The Book of Torn Fish”

Print

“When I Hear That You Are Dead” and “Enkidu Writes a Letter to Eve” in Saint Katherine Review**

Saint Katherine Review

“The Book of Genes” in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics***

TAB Editor Anna Leahy says, “If you’d like a copy mailed to you, please send an old-fashioned check for $10 made out to Chapman University to TAB, Dept. of English, Chapman University, One University Drive, Orange, CA 92866.” There will also be free copies of this incredible postcard issue of TAB available at AWP!

 “Sleeping Beauty’s Mother,” “Wendy Lady,” “The Story of Grandmother,” “Baba Yaga’s Answer,” and “Beauty to the Beast” in Fairy Tales and Folklore Re-imagined, an anthology from Between the Lines Publishing****

Fairy Tales & Folklore Re-imagined

Coming Soon

I’ve just updated my Events page to include newly scheduled readings and presentations in Indianapolis, South Bend, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and everywhere (online) between now and July.

Notes

*These prose poems are especially important to me. They’re from the manuscript about/to my Granny.

**These poems are also extra special. “When I Hear That You Are Dead” is for my late poet friend, Brett Foster.

***I’m so honored to be in this issue of TAB with Hadara Bar-Nadav (my MA professor who taught me how to submit for publication), and with Denise Duhamel and E. Ethelbert Miller, poets I admire. TAB has a new design every issue, and I love this postcard format.

****I’m so thrilled that Ellen Huang, my TA and friend, also has 7 short stories in this anthology, You should definitely get a copy of this one and read it at bedtime.

A Long December, or 2017 in Review

News from December: I published the second anniversary issue of Whale Road Review, and it is just gorgeous. The Cresset also published a really wonderful review of Tasty Other. I’m so grateful for Rebekah Denison Hewitt’s thoughtful examination of my book!

As for 2017, my time as a Poetry Has Value blogger in 2016 definitely changed the way I submitted my work for publication. I aimed for more paying and top-tier journals than ever before. Here are my stats:

Submissions: 87
Acceptances: 17 (38 poems total)
Paying acceptances: The Cresset, The American Journal of Nursing, Ryga, and Qu ($175 so far, with $100 U.S. and $200 Canadian pending).
Rejections: 48
Still pending: 18
Publications: 13 poems in 9 journals and anthologies (Ink & Letters, The American Journal of Nursing, UnLost Journal, Rogue Agent, The Cresset, Heron Tree, Psaltery & Lyre, The Nice Cage, San Diego Poetry Annual)

For 2018, I hope to spend more time writing and revising, to pull together a new manuscript, and to keeping submitting work widely. I already got my first acceptance and my first rejection of 2018 on January 2 within hours of each other. 🙂

Next up: I’ll be reading poetry tomorrow night at 7 at San Diego Writers, Ink in Liberty Station with Anna DiMartino and Michael Mark.