{"id":6207,"date":"2023-05-16T16:22:18","date_gmt":"2023-05-16T20:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/?p=6207"},"modified":"2023-05-17T09:03:18","modified_gmt":"2023-05-17T13:03:18","slug":"qa-with-sandra-beasley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/qa-with-sandra-beasley\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A With Sandra Beasley"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 2023 Akron Poetry Prize competition is still underway! While we will continue to accept submissions<\/a> through June 15, 2023 by 5 pm, we invite you to get to know our final judge, Sandra Beasley<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sandra Beasley is the author of four poetry collections\u2014Made to Explode<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Count the Waves<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0I Was the Jukebox<\/em><\/a>, which won the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and\u00a0Theories of Falling<\/em><\/a>\u2014as well as\u00a0Don\u2019t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life<\/em><\/a>, a disability memoir and cultural history of food allergies. She served as the editor for\u00a0Vinegar and Char: Verse<\/em>\u00a0from the Southern Foodways Alliance<\/em>. Honors for her work include the 2019 Munster Literature Centre\u2019s John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, a 2015 NEA fellowship, and six DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships. She lives in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

Recently, Sandra caught up with Brittany LaPointe, Marketing, Outreach & Publishing Services Coordinator for the University of Akron Press, to talk truth and poetry.<\/p>\n

What drew you into reading and writing poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was taught by Rose MacMurray, known as \u201cThe Poetry Lady\u201d of Fairfax County Public Schools for many years, and nurtured tremendously by various teachers at Spring Hill Elementary School, Haycock Elementary School, Longfellow Middle School, and Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. We\u2019re in a cultural moment where the programming of K-12 schools, particularly public schools, is under invasive threat. Teachers need and deserve intellectual freedom, as well as sustained funding and a beyond-mere-living wage; in the absence of these resources, creative writing and the arts are quick to suffer.<\/p>\n

Who are your biggest influences?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Poets are sponges! We\u2019re influenced by everything: a scientific breakthrough, a street scene, a jazz set, a video of capybaras, the meal we just ate, an episode of television. Alternately: Rita Dove, one of my many incredible undergraduate teachers at the University of Virginia, models what it means to be a brilliant writer while also serving as an international ambassador and curator for poetry. Also: I am regularly moved by the visual arts because I live in Washington, D.C., a city with a terrific museum culture. My husband is a painter. My mother is a painter.<\/p>\n

Your poetry often employs repetition in meaningful ways; how much attention do you give repetition while reading another poet\u2019s work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am highly attentive to structure, which Gregory Orr\u2014another beloved UVA mentor\u2014might describe as one of the \u201cfour temperaments\u201d of the poem. Anaphora and iterative syntax are always a delight to encounter on the page. Sprawl and unspooling can be powerful tools, as well; my only caveat is that I\u2019m wary of over-enjambment, which is a pervasive quality of late 20th<\/sup> C.\/early 21st<\/sup> C. American poetics. One of my MFA mentors at American University, Henry Taylor, described it as the \u201ckudzu\u201d of the page. I\u2019ve never shaken that association.<\/p>\n

What are you currently reading?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What\u2019s literally in my traveling bag, right now? Standing in the Forest of Being Alive: A Memoir in Poems<\/em>, by Katie Farris; Easy Beauty: A Memoir<\/em>, by Chlo\u00e9 Cooper Jones. Plus students\u2019 work.<\/p>\n

What gets you writing; what are you favorite prompts?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Selfishly, the act of reading is what gets me writing. For years, I said I wasn\u2019t a \u201cprompt\u201d person, and I even left several writing groups because of my resistance to them. What I\u2019ve realized since then is that the prompts that work for me are highly formal: a golden shovel, a set of sestina endwords, a series of poems using the Traveler\u2019s Vade Mecum <\/em>for title conventions, and so on. Sure, they are idiosyncratic, but they are still \u201cprompts\u201d at the end of the day. As a teacher, I\u2019ve witnessed the irrefutable value of prompts. I shouldn\u2019t have been so grumpy about them early on.<\/p>\n

How do you think growing up in Virginia has influenced your writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is no disentangling of \u201cwhere\u201d I grew up from \u201chow\u201d I grew up. I love Virginia, and I am troubled by Virginia, and I spent eight years in the figurative educational shadow of Thomas Jefferson. This is a much larger conversation, but the home region of my first 20 years sits at such a peculiar tipping place between identifying as the \u201cNorthern\u201d or \u201cSouthern\u201d United States. Where I have chosen to live for my subsequent 20 years\u2014Washington, D.C.\u2014has its own odd relationship to being the \u201cnation\u2019s capital\u201d versus an independent and deeply Democratic city.<\/p>\n

Is there anything you\u2019d like us to know about how you\u2019ll approach judging the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am open to any style, as long as I can discern intentionality and risk in the work. I won\u2019t just read your \u201cfirst ten pages\u201d; I\u2019ll embrace the whole of the manuscript, valuing richness of ideas over technical perfection. And, as someone who has been in these same contest trenches, I\u2019m honored that you would trust me with your poems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2023 Akron Poetry Prize competition is still underway! While we will continue to accept submissions through June 15, 2023 by 5 pm, we invite you to get to know our final judge, Sandra Beasley. Sandra Beasley is the author of four poetry collections\u2014Made to Explode,\u00a0Count the Waves,\u00a0I Was the Jukebox, which won the 2009 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4731,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4731"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6207"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6212,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6207\/revisions\/6212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}