Celebrating Poetry April 12, 2010

Topic of the Week: April 12-16, 2010

LitChat is delighted to participate in National Poetry Month with a week of poetry discussion. Although an American tradition inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, LitChat would like to see this important element of literature receive international spotlight.

Zinta Aistars

Joining us for a special evening edition of #litchat on Wednesday, April 14 at 9 p.m. ET, is Zinta Aistars. A bilingual, published author of three books (in Latvian) and working on a fourth (in English), Zinta is founder and editor of The Smoking Poet, a literary ezine established in 2006. Her work (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, book reviews and blogs) has been extensively published online and in print publications and appears in several anthologies. She is a writer and editor for a large health care organization and resides in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Diane Seuss

In addition to her visit on Wednesday evening, Zinta Aistars has prepared a round of questions for our regular Monday and Wednesday afternoon chats (4 p.m. ET) that are sure to stimulate lively discussion between to poets and non-poets alike.

On Friday, April 16 at our regular 4 p.m. ET time, poet Diane Seuss joins us as guest  host. Diane Seuss’s new collection of poems, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, won the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry and will be published at the end of April 2010 by the University of Massachusetts Press. New Issues Press published her first book, It Blows You Hollow, in 1998.  Recent poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Poetry, New Orleans Review, and Brevity. Seuss is Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College, where she won the Florence J. Lucasse Award for Excellence in Teaching.

See what is happening throughout the remaining days of National Poetry Month at Poets.org.

Follow Zinta Aistars on Twitter at @ZintaAistars and @TheSmoking Poet.

Follow Diane Seuss on Twitter at @DlSeuss.

Read chatscript from National Poetry Month discussions here.