Interviews

UC–Riverside
California, Meet Your Laureate: Juan Felipe Herrera

March 2014
As the state's ninth poet laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera is added to the history books as one of the laureates for the state with the longest-running position of state poet laureate—official or not.

Read the interview here.





Poetry on the Slopes – 
With Richard Blanco
A ski trail is named after Blanco's poem "One Today"

February 2014
He's conquered one of the largest public speaking venues you can imagine. Now, presidential inaugural poet Richard Blanco will have to commit and keep upright on a ski trail named after his inaugural poem.



Walt Whitman
@TweetsOfGrass
1855 Leaves of Grass, little by little, over and over. 

September 2013
In the summer of 2011, Walt Whitman joined the twitterverse. Tweet by tweet, this anonymous avatar of the American bard recounts Leaves of Grass 140 characters at a time, day after day, line after line. And it's all under the thumbs of nearly 10,000 followers.

Read the interview here. 


Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
Death of a Ventriloquist
Vassar Miller Prize, Texas A&M University Press
2012, 80 pp.
gibsonfayleblanc.com

January 2013
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is–in addition to being a poet–a teacher, father, novelist, and a significant figure in the field of literary education in Portland, Maine. As a former director of The Telling Room, a children's nonprofit writing center overlooking Portland's Old Port, Gibson's efforts have added to the appreciation of writing and reading in a diverse, international, and beyond-emerging literary city.
     In 2012, his first book of poetry Death of a Ventriloquist was selected for the Vassar Miller Prize from University of North Texas Press, judged by Lisa Russ Spaar. A reader quickly acknowledges that the book is a great testament to the practice of voice and persona in poetry.

Read the interview here.