FEATURING: Loretta Collins Ricantations Klobah Joanne C. Hillhouse Business Outreach

Joey Garcia Writers’

Conference

POUi: con-texts

August 08, 2018

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Welcome to POUi: con-texts

POUi: con-texts is a new way for the POUi family to stay in touch with each other. If you're a POUi contributor and have a text of any kind you'd like to share, just drop angela a line and she'll spread the word.

Best wishes,

Rob Leyshon Nicola Hunte Editors, POUi: Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing

POUi: con-texts

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Loretta Collins Klobah

Loretta Collins Klobah’s first book The Twelve Foot Neon Woman (Peepal Tree Press, 2011) received the OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in the category of poetry and was short-listed for the Felix Dennis Prize in the Forward Prize series. She has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the Earl Lyons Award from The Academy of American Poets, and the Pam Wallace Award for an Aspiring Woman Writer. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. She lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she is a professor of Caribbean literature and creative writing at University of Puerto Rico. She earned an M.F.A. in poetry writing from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she also completed a doctoral degree in English, with an emphasis on Caribbean literary and cultural studies. She was one of eight poets featured in the anthology New Caribbean Poetry, edited by Kei Miller (Carcanet Press, 2007), and her poetry has also been anthologized in the1996 Pushcart Prize Anthology, TriQuarterly New Writers, and the collection How Much Earth?

Her poetry and scholarly essays have been published widely in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, with poems appearing in such journals as The Caribbean Writer, Poui: The Cave Hill Literary Journal, TriQuarterly Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, The Antioch Review, Cimarron Review and Poet Lore. She was also the recipient of a tuition scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont. Loretta Collins Klobah’s poem "Tissue Gallery, " was published in a November 2015 issue of The New Yorker, you can hear her reading the poem on the New Yorker website. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/tissue-gallery

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Loretta Collins Klobah

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Loretta Collins Klobah

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Ricantations will reinforce the perception of Collins Klobah as superb poetic story-teller with a compassionate and radical womanist vision, alert to the multi-layered reality of Puerto Rican life, where shiny modernity gives way to spirit presences. Poems begin from the most fantastic premises – a Che Guevera club in heaven with prizes for the coolest Che impersonator – then line by rich baroque line open up her island’s secret heart, revealing a society under multiple pressures even before Hurricane Maria, about which the title poem offers a brilliantly hallucinatory picture. Love must always be mixed with despair for a society where the reckless machismo of New Year gunfire kills a young woman, and older men prey on schoolgirls.

Loretta Collins Klobah

Excerpt from Peepal Tree Press text summary http://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/ricantations

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Joanne C. Hillhouse

Business Cards

Joanne has made available for us her beautiful business cards based on the books she has published (the us includes fellow subscribers to POUi). Please be encouraged to pass on to others.

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Joey Garcia

Historic Literary Event for Belize The First Writers’ Conference held in the Caribbean Nation

Belizean-born author, Joey Garcia, launched the Belize Writers’ Conference in April, the first event of its kind in the Caribbean nation. The five-day conference at a beachfront eco-lodge on Ambergris Caye featured New York literary agents, Carrie Howland from Empire Literary and Kate Johnson of MaKenzie Wolf, along with authors Jane Staw and Garcia as faculty. Fifteen participants—published authors and unpublished writers—from the U.S. and Belize had their manuscripts critiqued by the agents. Participants also attended Master Classes on nourishing a writing practice and generating press for their books.

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Joey Garcia

Garcia said she created the BWC in part because Belizean literature is rarely published outside of Belize and she has never seen a Belizean featured at a literary festival. In addition, as a relationship advice columnist, she hoped to shift the way writers and agents interact. “Writers struggle to get the attention of literary agents,” said Garcia, “so I created an event where writers can vacation with agents in my native Belize and receive useful manuscript critiques from the agents. I wanted writers to develop friendships with agents and stop acting so intimidated by them.”

Historic Literary Event for Belize The First Writers’ Conference held in the Caribbean Nation

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Joey Garcia

“I would encourage any writer looking for a writing-intensive conference in a beautiful setting to attend the Belize Writers’ Conference,” added agent Carrie Howland. “I would love to come back.”

Garcia also established the first literary fellowship in Belize with funding from the Copal Distillery Foundation.

Ivory Kelly, from Belmopan, won the first-ever Copal Distillery Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at BWC.

Historic Literary Event for Belize The First Writers’ Conference held in the Caribbean Nation

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Joey Garcia

Historic Literary Event for Belize The First Writers’ Conference held in the Caribbean Nation

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Joey Garcia

“Plans are underway for BWC 2019. Garcia said the conference will remain small to ensure authentic friendships.”

“I’m also extremely thankful to Joey Garcia and the Belize Writers’ Conference for creating a first-rate conference for Belize and for seeking out this fellowship specifically to support a local writer.”

Historic Literary Event for Belize The First Writers’ Conference held in the Caribbean Nation

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Joey Garcia

Panel writing Biz

Joella Aragon writing

BWC Am Writing

Joey Garcia Leading

Historic Literary Event for Belize The First Writers’ Conference held in the Caribbean Nation

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Ivory Kelly

Howland and Johnson

BWC2018 Group photo

btb bags

Joey Garcia

Historic Literary Event for Belize The First Writers’ Conference held in the Caribbean Nation

POUi: con-texts

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TO BE CONTINUED … 15

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