Poet Jericho Brown is one of the ten winners of the 2009 Whiting Writers' Award, which honors writers of exceptional talent early in their careers with $50,000. Jericho's poetry book,
Please, is his first, published by New Issues Poetry & Prose in 2008. He lives in San Diego. The following poem appeared in
HFR #41.
Track 3: (Back Down) Memory Lane
It’s Friday night
In Shreveport. Checks
Have been cashed, bills
Folded and stashed
Into wallets and bra straps.
Card tables, folding chairs,
And every gold tooth in town
Crowd our grandmother’s
Camelback shotgun house
Because she cuts
Only two dollars a hand
For every joker that slides
Into a queen. We don’t know
Minnie Riperton’s dead
Years now, buried
With one breast to her name.
School-uniformed in a corner,
We learn to listen to music
Over hollers, through
Smoke. Her soprano comes across
A photograph in giggles,
But ends up crying,
Save me. We think we’d like that
Kind of love, sad and steeped
In trumpets, though a block up
The entire decade shoots
For words to put in the dictionary:
Crackhead, drive-by. Loss
And gain. The bullet
Meant for a man named Money
Removes his baby sister’s chin.
Ask for horns in Shreveport
And sirens are on the way.
We can’t hear either, grandmama
Calling for us to change
The tape, No more slow songs,
Keep us awake, these years
Before surgeons slice her
In vain, and we drive
Away, our car stereos
Playing rhythm and blues.
Jennifer K. Sweeney’s collection How to Live on Bread and Music (Perugia Press) received the 2009 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, which gives $5,000 to the most outstanding second book by an American poet each year. The book was chosen by poets Robin Becker, Bob Hicok, and Afaa Michael Weaver.
The National Book Award is celebrating 60 years. Until September 21, their blog will devote one page each day to a past fiction winner, including the book's original cover, comments from critics and writers, the list of other finalists, other important literary events that year, and links to relevant reading about the selected book. The blog began on July 7 with 1950's The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren.
The new PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories is out. This volume's new association with the PEN American Center comes at a good time for the award, which has undergone a creative struggle with format in recent years. William Abraham, who edited the collection for three decades until 1996, governed with a distinctive editorial voice and an apparent preference for bleakness that could leave a reader of the volume depressed for days. After he retired, the series became lost in a literary wilderness for a while, with different editors and experimentations with the format. Though it could be argued that it was time for a change, the confusion that reigned afterward was no kind of improvement: One of the editors, Larry Dark, included a story in the 2000 volume by his wife, Alice Elliot Dark and nonsensical statements like this were issued on the publisher’s FAQ page as the series tried to stop its slow skid: 
