National Poetry Month: Q&A with Traci Brimhall
Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Believer, Kenyon Review, and The New Republic. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best of the Net, PBS Newshour, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She is also a co-author with Brynn Saito of a collaborative chapbook, Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2013). She holds degrees from Florida State University (BA) and Sarah Lawrence College (MFA). Currently, she teaches creative writing at Western Michigan University where she is a doctoral candidate and a King/Chávez/Parks Fellow.
1. Imagine you’re a poetry lobbyist in D.C.: What would be the first thing on your agenda?
Re-launch Reading Rainbow and devote episodes to poetry!
2. Name one other poet who has influenced you profoundly and why.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly because of her fierce and fearsome vision of the world. I’ll never forget the first time I read the poem “Song.”
3. Recommend one print and one online publication you think everyone should read this month.
The Paris-American is a great online publication that features several poems by a new poet every week. The poems are always stunning. I’d also recommend getting an issue of POETRY. It’s a journal that’s been around a long time and plenty of people know it, but they may not know that the new editor, Don Share, has been choosing some incredibly vital and risky poems.
