Here is a collection of contemporary elegies by 15 poets and a violinist compiled during what the Chinese call the season of grief. When faced with great loss, many artists search for remnants of memory to create something meaningful out of what is gone. What the living do, if we are to follow Marie Howe’s edict, is to make music and poetry.
Contributors to Autumnal: Vicki Brown, Tedi Lopez-Mills, Wendy Burk, Jennifer Barber, Sylvia Um, Sandra Lim, Jane Miller, Marie Howe, Deborah Fries, Renee Angle, Niki Herd, Elline Lipkin, Joni Wallace, Olga Broumas, Frances Sjoberg, and Ann Dernier.
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Tedi López Mills is a poet, essayist, translator, and editor. From 1994 to 1999, she was Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal La Gaceta. In 1998, she received the first poetry grant awarded by the Octavio Paz Foundation. Her poetry books includeCinco estaciones, Un lugar ajeno, Segunda persona, (for which she received the Efraín Huerta National Literature Prize), Glosas, Horas and Luz por aire y agua. A small selection of her work has just been published by Kore Press, under the titleWhile Light Is Built. Since 2000 she has been a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores.
Titles Available from Kore Press:”
While Light Is Built
Autumnal; an Audio CD
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Wendy Burk (she/her/hers) is a poet and translator of Spanish. She has twice been named Artist-in-Residence with the National Park Service (2001, Isle Royale National Park; 2003, Buffalo National River). Together with poet Eric Magrane, she is at work on a collaborative book based on these residencies.
Titles available from Kore Press:
While Light is Built; translation of Tedi Lopez Mills
The Deer; a Broadside
Autumnal; an Audio CD
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Jennifer Barber, Kore Press Author
Jennifer Barber (she/her/hers) attended Colby College in Maine and studied medieval literature in England as a Rhodes Scholar. She received her MFA from Columbia University. A selection of her work appears in the anthology Take Three: 3, Agni New Poets Series (Graywolf Press, 1998); a selection also appears in the anthology Four Way Reader #2 (Four Way Books, 2001). She has also had poems inPartisan Review, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, and The Journal.
Barber’s Rigging the Wind won the $1,000 Kore Press First Book Award in 2002, the inaugural award of the year, and was published by Kore in June of 2003, the publishing house’s 10th year anniversary. The contest was judged by poet Jane Miller, distinguished author of several volumes of poetry and past recipient of a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. She has recently published a second title from Kore Press, Given Away, a collection of poems that meditates on spirituality.
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Sylvia Sohn Um was born on May 9, 1968, in Kellogg, Idaho, to parents Richard and Patricia Um, who immigrated to the U.S. from Korea in 1963. She graduated from the University of Arizona Department of English in 1994 as one of the brightest students to pass through this university.
Among her honors are included the Arizona Regents’ Academic Achievement Award, a University of Arizona Fine Arts Scholarship, the Hattie Locket Poetry Award, and the Outstanding Senior Award from the College of Humanities. In addition to her literary achievements, Um was an accomplished musician (piano and violin) who performed with the University of Arizona Symphony Orchestra and Arizona Opera Company.
She died on November 7, 1996, while she was in her second year of the Master of Fine Arts program in poetry at the University of Maryland. She is remembered by her family, teachers, and many dear friends.
Titles Available from Kore Press:
The Rooted Heart
Autumnal; an Audio CD
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Sandra Lim was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals including Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. She lives in San Francisco.
Barnard has announced that The Wilderness by Sandra Lim has received the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize for the best second collection of poems by an American woman poet. The biennial prize, awarded jointly by Women Poets at Barnard and the publisher W.W. Norton & Company, includes publication of the work and a free public reading at Barnard. The Wilderness was published in 2014 by W. W. Norton & Company.
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Jane Miller, Kore Press Author
Jane Miller lives in Tucson, AZ, where she serves on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. Her publications include The Greater Leisures from Doubleday in 1983; American Odalisque, a book of poems from Copper Canyon Press; and Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel, from Michigan’s Poets on Poetry Series. Most recently, Ms. Miller received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award.
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Marie Howe, Kore Press Author
Marie Howe received a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Agni,Harvard Review, and New England Review, among others. She is the author ofWhat the Living Do and The Good Thief, which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
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Renee Angle, Kore Press Author
Renee Angle (she/her/hers) is the author of WoO (Letter Machine Editions, 2016). Her writing has appeared in the literary journals Entropy Magazine, Western Humanities Review, The Volta, Diagram, Practice New Art + Writing, Sonora Review, EOAGH in addition to the anthology I’LL DROWN MY BOOK: CONCEPTUAL WRITING BY WOMEN (Les Figues Press, 2012), and in the chapbook Lucy Design in the Papal Flea (dancing girl press, 2010). She lives and works in Tucson, AZ, where she is an archivist for The League for Holographic Music and the Education Programs Coordinator for the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She holds an MFA from George Mason University.
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Niki Herd, Kore Press Author
Niki Herd grew up in Cleveland and received degrees in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and Antioch in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies and has been supported by organizations including the Astraea Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her first collection of poems, The Language of Shedding Skin (Main Street Rag, 2010), was published as part of the Editor’s Select Poetry Series. She lives in Washington, DC.
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Elline Lipkin, Kore Press Author
Elline Lipkin grew up in Miami, FL, and attended Wesleyan University. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 1994 and her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston in 2003. She has worked as an editor in both New York City and in Paris. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Margie, North American Review, The Texas Review, and in The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. Currently, she is studying contemporary American women’s poetry as a Beatrice M. Bain Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Joni Wallace, Kore Press Author
Joni Wallace earned an MFA from the University of Montana, was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship by the Arizona Commission on the Arts in 1999, and recently completed a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches poetry with author Richard Shelton in the Arizona State Prison and at the University of Arizona, Extended University.
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Olga Broumas (she/her/hers) holds an MFA in poetry and a BA in Architecture and is poet-in-residence at Brandeis University. She has received Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships. Her books include Beginning with O, a Yale Younger poets selection; Perpetua; Pastoral Jazz; and What I Love andThe Little Mariner, two translations of Odysseas Elytis.
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Frances Sjoberg, Kore Press Author
Frances Sjoberg was a literary director at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Under Ms. Sjoberg’s leadership, the Poetry Center became known nationally for producing innovative programs, including: The Statewide Bilingual Corrido Contest for High School Students, The Community Creative Writing Classes and Workshops, the publication of VERSE! Poetry for Young Children, The Mary Ann Campau Memorial Fellowship for Local Writers and The National Symposia. According to Gail Browne, the executive director of the Poetry Center, “Frances has an unquenchable desire to make a positive contribution to society by serving the underserved, by giving ‘voice’ to the often unheard and creating opportunity for communities to come together around common goals.”
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Ann Dernier, Kore Press Author
Ann Dernier (she/her/hers) is co-founder of Poets’ Studio, a workshop series for writers, as well as a juried artist on the Arizona Commission on the Arts Teaching Artist Roster. She serves on the editorial team for Koré Press and is a guest poet for the Grrls Literary Activism Series. She is editor of Writing Out of the Darkness, an anthology of poetry by torture survivors and their families. Her work appears in local and national publications including Autumnal: A Collection of Elegies (audio collection available at Koré Press), Three Penny Review, Red Poppy Review and an upcoming collection, Tucson in the Aftermath: Prose, Politics & Hope, in honor of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. She received a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
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Deborah Fries, Kore Press Author
Deborah Fries was the Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania from 2006 – 2007. Her poems have appeared in North American Review, Cimarron Review, Terrain, and other journals, including the premiere issue ofCream City Review. A recipient of a grant from the Leeway Foundation, she lives in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. She received an MA in English from the University of Wisconsin.
Her first book, Various Modes of Departure, was selected by Carolyn Forché as a Kore Press First Book Winner. In the anthology Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq, Fries writes about her time in the US Air Force, which she joined in 1968. After one year, she left with her sergeant, a Vietnam vet, whom she married. She says that marriage and pregnancy seemed preferable to working in a field hospital in Southeast Asia.
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