The Host Dispatch: A Literary Podcast

Happy Women In Translation Month!

This year, we've put together the first official Host Publications Women In Translation Month Reading List, which includes many of our all-time favorite WIT titles, some new faves, a few books that are on our "to-read" lists, and even some books translated by women. 

In this episode, we discuss our beloved WIT reading list, before diving into three amazing books we wanted to highlight:

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, with translations by the author (Biblioasis)

Our Lady of The Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Melanie Mauthner (Archipelago Books)

Yi Sang: Selected Works with translations by Don Mee Choi and Sawako Nakayasu (Wave Books)

Introducing: The Austin Youth Poet Laureate Program

The Austin Youth Poet Laureate program has landed in Austin! We here at Host Publications are thrilled to partner with the Library Foundation and the National Youth Poet Laureate Program led by Urban Word, with additional support from the Austin Public Library, Creative Learning Initiative, and Learn All The Time. 

In this episode, we discuss the details of this exciting new program for young writers in Austin, and all of the benefits that it offers them, for their writing, their confidence, and for their engagement with their communities. 

We had the opportunity to speak with the inaugural Teaching Artists who ran the application workshops this year, to hear about their experiences in the workshops and to get a better sense of what this program will offer young writers in Austin. 

 

We spoke with Bianca Perez: (she/her) Bianca was born and raised in Mission, Texas – a small southern town bordering Mexico. She is currently an MFA Poetry candidate at Texas State University. Her poems have been published in The New York Quarterly, Re-side Magazine, Magma Poetry UK, ReclamationATX, Psst! Press’ The Sappho Diaries, and East French Press. Forthcoming in The Ice Colony Anthology. She is also the co-host of a horror podcast with writer Stephanie Grossman. Her poetry centers on her Latin culture, spirituality, family, and womanhood.

We also spoke with Steven Espada Dawson: (he/him) is a writer from East Los Angeles, currently working out of Austin. The son of a Mexican immigrant, he holds an MFA in poetry from Purdue University. He has served as poetry editor for Sycamore Review and Copper Nickel. Winner of the Barriss and Iola Mills Award and the Kneale Award, his poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets 2020, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Hobart, Kenyon Review Online, Split Lip Magazine, and Waxwing, among other journals.

 

We want to encourage any and all interested folks to apply for the Youth Poet Laureate position this year by Sunday, August 15, 2021, at 11:59pm, or to take the Application Workshops next year for a fully immersive creative experience. Head on over to the Library Foundation's website for more information on how to apply, and follow Library Foundation ATX and Host Publications on social media for updates on deadlines, the inaugural winner, readings and the forthcoming chapbook! 

Beach Reads!

In this episode, the Host team deconstructs and reimagines the idea of a "Beach Read," offering three unlikely candidates for this year's summer reading list that don't quite fit in with the mass-marketing schemes of the "Beach Read" convention: 

 

Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark

The Hour of The Star by Clarice Lispector

and The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

In Conversation with Poet Julie Poole

In this episode, Claire and Annar chat with poet and writer extraordinaire, Julie Poole. This episode airs on June 1st, 2021, which is the publication date for Julie's first full-length collection of poetry, Bright Specimen, published by fellow small Texas press, Deep Vellum. 

We had an enchanting conversation with Julie about her poems in Bright Specimen, which were inspired by her exploration of the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at The University of Texas at Austin, the largest herbaria in the Southwestern United States.

Julie takes us on a journey into the herbarium, describing what it was like to discover that space, and how it became a sanctuary for her where her poems began to blossom and multiply into this beautiful book. 

Working at a small desk in the back of the building in the tower that was a sniper’s outpost in the 1966 UT mass shooting, Julie writes in her afterword that "Nature is the path forward; all of the lessons of unity are there.” 

To read more about Julie and her writing, including her incredible essays published in places like HuffPost, Publisher's Weekly and The Texas Observer, visit her website https://www.juliepoolejp.com

Julie Poole was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from The University of Texas at Austin. Her first book of poems, Bright Specimen, was inspired by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at The University of Texas at Austin and will be published by Deep Vellum on June 1st, 2021. She has received fellowship support from the James A. Michener Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and Yaddo. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature. Her poems and essays have appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, CutBank, Denver Quarterly, Poet Lore, Cold Mountain Review, HuffPost, and elsewhere. Her arts and culture writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Publishers Weekly, Sightlines, The Texas Observer, and Texas Monthly. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her growing collection of found butterflies.

One Year Anniversary Minisode!

Welcome to the 1 Year Anniversary Episode of the Host Dispatch! 

 

In this episode, we are celebrating the 1 year anniversary of The Host Dispatch with so much joy in our hearts! We are grateful for the opportunity to connect more deeply with each other, with poetry, great literature, and with you, our dear listeners. <3

In this episode, we reflect upon our very first episode, Poetry for Quarantimes, which aired on May 26th, 2020 We discuss the ways in which the world has changed since then, and how it has changed us. 

 

We also bring More Poetry to the table to help us frame our experience of the last year. The books we discuss in this episode are:

Moscow in the Plague Year by Marina Tsvetaeva (Archipelago Books) and

How to Carry Water: Selected Poems by Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions)

This podcast is so dear to our hearts, and it is an honor and a joy to share it with you. As always, thanks for listening.

Eco-Surrealism, Silvina Ocampo, and Earth Day with Poet Julie Howd

In this episode, we had the pleasure of talking again with poet, Julie Howd. 

Julie defines her term "Eco-Surrealism" in this episode, and we discuss the intersection of avant-garde poetry and the ever-pressing fight for the health of our planet. 

In this context, we discuss the work of Argentinian poet, Silvina Ocampo, specifically her selected poems published by NYRB.

Julie's Eco-Surrealist Recommended Reading List:

Whale and Vapor by Kim Kyung Ju

The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa

Whale in the Woods by Blueberry Elizabeth Morningsnow

Sea Summit by Yi Lu

Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals by Joy Williams

Beasts of Burden by Sanaura Taylor

Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism and Black Veganism from Two Sisters by Aph Ko and Syl Ko

The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster  

Quantum weirdness and surrealism Ball, P. Quantum weirdness and surrealism. Nature 453, 983–984 (2008)

 

Book, Film and Exhibit References in this Episode:

 

Las Dîners de Gala by Salvador Dalí

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley 

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

Exhibit: "Garden City Mega City"

Film: Queen of Diamonds by Nina Menkes

 

Ways to Get Involved for Earth Day

In Austin: 

• Check out Austin's Zero Waste Resource Recovery Program
• The Trail Foundation - Weekly Volunteer Opportunities: Ecological Restoration and Trash Clean-up

• Join the Citizens’ Climate Lobby Austin Chapter to build relationships with elected officials, the media and your local community

• Donate to the Austin Bat Refuge to help conserve the Austin bat population, vital to our local ecosystem
• Volunteer or Donate to Austin Wildlife Refuge (You can also support them by buying merch from their online store!)
• Volunteer or Intern with Environment Texas to protect Texas natural areas from development, to improve enforcement of our clean air laws, and to bring more wind and solar energy to Texas
•  

Nationally:

• Donate to the Rainforest Foundation or check out their list of 10 Things You Can Do to Save the Rainforest
• Donate to the National Park Foundation
• Donate to World Animal Protection
• Donate to 350.org to stand up to the fossil fuel industry to stop all new coal, oil and gas projects and build a clean energy future for all
• Join the Good Food Institute community or Donate to their cause to accelerate alternative protein innovation
• Check out the Coral Restoration Foundation and all the amazing ways to get involved, including hands-on Dive Programs 
• Donate or Volunteer with Sea Shepherd Global to help conserve and protect our oceans **Julie's disclaimer: "These guys might be pirates" 

 

Julie Howd is a poet and educator from Massachusetts. She is the author of Threshold (Host Publications, 2020), winner of the Host Publications Chapbook prize, and Talking from the Knees Up (dancing girl press, 2018). She holds an MFA from the University of Texas, Austin, and has received fellowships from the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and the James A. Michener Center. Her work can be found in Sixth Finch, The Spectacle, Deluge, and elsewhere. She lives in Amherst, MA.

 

 

Celebrating National Poetry Month

In this episode, Host editors Claire and Annar, and publisher Joe celebrate National Poetry Month by reading a few poems and discussing how they serve as examples of how each of us as individuals find access, or entry points into poems, and why we love poetry. 

The poems we discussed in this episode are:

“Diving Into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich from Diving Into the Wreck 

“Poem for an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber” by Dobby Gibson from Little Glass Planet (Graywolf Press)

“Girls Respond Quickly to a Call from Up High” by Sawako Nakayasu from Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From (Wave Books)

For the entire month of April, we are offering 20% off all poetry titles through our website, www.hostpublications.com, and as a special bonus: we’re also handpicking a complimentary Host 88 poetry title with every order we fulfill, all month long! Thanks for celebrating poetry with us, and as always, thanks for listening. 

Submissions CLOSING SOON for the Host Publications Chapbook Prize

Just a quick PSA announcing that the submissions window for the Host Publications Chapbook Prize will be closing at 11:59pm CST on Monday, March 15th! 

Submissions guidelines and more information about the prize can be found on our website.

We can't wait to read your work!

Congress of the Spirits: A Poetry Ritual and Performance Featuring: lily someson, Taisia Kitaiskaia, Heather Christle, Claude Cardona, Faylita Hicks, and Dorothea Lasky

Welcome to Congress of the Spirits: a poetry ritual and performance. We wanted to create a sacred space in the airwaves for us to commune in, focusing on nourishing our depleted spirits with poetry that stimulates the imagination and crosses over into the dreamworld in which we can imagine a better future. 

Before this magical reading, Claire and Annar offer a short meditative ritual to enter the virtual and imaginative space of the performance, where we can all share in the experience of poetry. 

For the ritual: If you have these things (or some of these things) on hand, please gather: a scented item that brings you comfort, a scrap of paper and a writing utensil, and a candle. If not, you just need your imagination.

Our Magical Readers:

lily someson is a poet and essayist from Chicago. She has obtained a B.A. in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago and is a winner of the 2020 Eileen Lannan poetry prize with the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Spring 2021 Host Publications Chapbook Prize for her chapbook, mistaken for loud comets. She has been published or is forthcoming in Court Green, Queeriosity, and Columbia Poetry Review among others. She is currently a first-year Poetry MFA student at Vanderbilt University and an assistant poetry editor of the Nashville Review.

On Ritual, lily says: Some of her favorite rituals include grocery shopping, antiquing, postcard collecting, and visiting Lake Michigan on warm summer mornings.

 

Taisia Kitaiskaia is the author of four books: The Nightgown and Other Poems; Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers, a collaboration with artist Katy Horan and an NPR Best Book of 2017; and Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles as well as its follow-up, Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times: From Ask Baba Yaga. She is the recipient of fellowships from the James A. Michener Center for Writers and The Corporation of Yaddo. 

On Ritual, Taisia says: "I have a small wooden fairy door against a big bald cypress in the yard. On special occasions, I'll leave a note or talisman behind the door.

 

Heather Christle is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Heliopause. Her first work of nonfiction, The Crying Book, was published in 2019, with translations now appearing in many languages throughout Europe and Asia. She teaches creative writing at Emory University.

Heather says: My favorite ritual is taking a nap, which I do every day. I do not mean to sound flippant; I cannot imagine how I could maintain waking consciousness and awareness of the world without that intervening rest.

 

Claude Cardona is a queer poet from San Antonio. Her chapbook What Remains is a collection of poems about longing and loving as a Chicana in Texas. Cardona is also the co-editor of Infrarrealista Review, a publication for Texan writers. 

Claude's rituals include: burning letters full of wishes under the full moon, leaving offerings on her altar, and always offering her friends 3 card tarot readings.

Faylita Hicks is an activist, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. They are the former Editor-in-Chief of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. They have been awarded fellowships and residencies from Tin House, Lambda Literary, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Broadway Advocacy, and the Right of Return USA. Their work is featured or forthcoming in Adroit, American Poetry Review, the Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, HuffPost, Longreads, Palette Poetry, Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, Slate, Texas Observer, VIDA Review, Yale Review, and others.

Faylita talks about ritual at the end of their reading, but they say this: “I chose these poems because they have little bits of my rituals inside of them.”

 

Dorothea Lasky is the author of six books of poetry and prose, including Animal (Wave Books). She teaches poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts and lives in New York City.

Dorothea Says: My favorite ritual involves taking endless naps and walks, and then spraying new mixes of scents everywhere before writing. This ritual is my greatest luxury and hasn't happened in so many years, but I am hoping it will again one day soon.

 

Celebrating Black History Month

In this episode, we celebrate Black History Month with a reading and discussion of the anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song edited by Kevin Young, Poetry Editor of The New Yorker.

This incredible anthology is described as "A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present," and in it we found familiar voices that we know and love, as well as new poets, and some whose work is hard to find or long out of print. This is a perfect start to reading African American poetry, and we highly recommend getting yourself a copy! 

Though there are so many great poets in this anthology, here are those we highlighted in this episode: 

Claude McKay 

June Jordan

Tyhimba Jess

Jericho Brown

Tracy K. Smith

Morgan Parker

For further listening, we recommend a recent episode of The New Yorker Poetry podcast called "Radical Imagination: Tracy K. Smith, Marilyn Nelson and Terrance Hayes on Poetry in Our Times"

We also recommend two AWP events, for which poets we highlighted in this episode will be panelists: 

Sunday, March 7th 1:30-2:30pm Central Time

Sn119. Poem About My Rights: June Jordan Speaks, Sponsored by Copper Canyon Press.

(Michael Wiegers, Rio Cortez, Jericho Brown, Monica Sok)
“I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name / My name is my own my own my own.” A panel of poets and editors will read and discuss iconic works by June Jordan, including the electric, revolutionary “Poem About My Rights.” In her too-short career, Jordan boldly, lyrically, and overtly called out the harms caused by anti-Black police violence, sexual abuse, and heterosexism, lighting a way forward for other writers. Each poet will offer one poem of their own to honor Jordan’s literary influence.

Wednesday March 3rd, 3:00-4:00pm Central Time

W136. The Futures of Documentary and Investigative Poetries.

(Solmaz Sharif, Erika Meitner, Tyehimba Jess, Philip Metres, Layli Long Soldier)
Investigative or documentary poetry situates itself at the nexus between literary production and journalism, where the mythic and factual, the visionary and political, and past and future all meet. From doing recovery projects to performing rituals of healing to inventing forms, panelists will share work (their own and others') and discuss challenges in docupoetic writing and its futures: the ethics of positionality, appropriation, fictionalizing, collaboration, and political engagement.

Thank you for joining us in honoring the lives and writing of Black poets, past and present, and as always, thanks for listening!