Super pleased to hear that Notes from the Journey Westward has won the 2013 High Plains Book Award in Poetry! Lots of great finalists and winners this year, including Louise Erdrich, Emily Danforth, and David Abrams, among others!
Category: News
The Magic Barrel
This weekend, at the Whiteside Theatre in Corvallis, I’ll be reading with a whole host of amazing Oregon writers as part of The Magic Barrel, an annual fundraiser for the Linn Benton Food Share. There’ll be music, wine, poetry–it ought to be fun!
Tupelo Quarterly
The inaugural issue of Tupelo Quarterly is live, and, wow, it’s a stunner, beginning with editor Jessamyn Smyth’s foreword. I couldn’t be more please to have two poems, “Trotline” and “Eat Stone and Go On,” included, as well as a very generous editor’s feature, Spikes & Rivers: The Work of Joe Wilkins.
Top Ten Nod at Contrary Magazine
They’re celebrating their tenth birthday over at Contrary Magazine, and the editors are picking their favorite selections from the archives. Jazzed to see that poetry editor Shaindel Beers chose my poem “The Garage Sale Daze Meditations,” which is part of my manuscript-in-progress, for her best of list!
Review of Notes from the Journey Westward
Big thanks to Montana Poet Laureate Tami Haaland for this careful, perceptive review of Notes from the Journey Westward. You couldn’t ask for a better review than this:
This book is visionary. It is admirably consistent and meditative, relentlessly honest in its rejection of any romantic version of the West, and reverent before stars and morning, before the earth and the people who have survived on it. Joe Wilkins honors them by telling their stories.
Notable Nod in Best American Essays 2013
Pleased to see that my essay “Eleven Kinds of Sky,” which was originally published in Orion Magazine and built of snippets from my memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, earned a notable nod in Best American Essays 2013, edited by Robert Atwan and Cheryl Strayed.
“Say” at The Utne Reader
Just saw that my story “Say,” which originally appeared in The Sun Magazine and was reprinted in The Utne Reader, is now up at Utne’s website. I had fun with this one.
Reading at Linfield College
Very pleased to be opening Linfield College’s Readings at the Nick Series this year! I’ll be up at the mic on Thursday, September 26, at 7:30 pm, and we’ve got lots of great folks coming this year, including Monica Drake, Peter Malae, Elena Passarello, and Chris Dombrowski!
Poem in Orion
My poem “Drought” appears in the latest issue of Orion. Lots of wonderful stuff in this issue (as always–Orion’s plain great!), including a stunning/scary essay on the breast cancer industrial complex by Jennifer Lunden and a dreamy meditation on borders, dying rivers, and ghosts by Luis Alberto Urrea.
Review of Notes from the Journey Westward
Thanks to Kathleen Kirk for this amazing review, up now at Escape Into Life, of my second book of poems, Notes from the Journey Westward. A few of my favorite lines:
Notes from the Journey Westward, by Joe Wilkins, reads like wisdom to me. “There’s nothing to be done / about hope,” he writes, in “Hardscrabble Prairie Triptych,” about cracking open mussel shells in search of pearls, and I feel directly addressed, required to examine the persistence and hopelessness of hope in myself, in us all, in the human animal: “We crack them open / anyway, shells bright as a boy’s eyes, / scoop out each stinking handful of meat.” The willingness to shift from “I” to “we” here is a clue to the risk and power of these poems, the great claim that one story can, like a covered wagon, carry many, and that history is somehow alive in the present moment.
joewilkins.org 