Glascock Poetry Contest 2025
Kirun Kapur
Biography
Kirun Kapur is a poet, editor, teacher, and translator. She is the author of three books of poetry, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015), which won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and the Antivenom Poetry Award; Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series; and the chapbook All the Rivers in Paradise (UChicago Arts, 2022). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, and many other journals. She serves as editor at the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program.
On the Web
Selected Works
All the Rivers in Paradise by Call Number: eBookPublication Date: 2022Part of The Migration Stories Chapbook Series, 2022. Drawn from the community at and around the University of Chicago.
Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry PS3611.A694 A6 2015ISBN: 9781932418521Publication Date: 2015-01-01Poetry. Southeast Asia Studies. VISITING INDIRA GANDHI'S PALMIST by Kirun Kapur is the winner of the 2013 Antivenom Poetry Award published by Elixir Press. "Kirun Kapur's debut volume VISITING INDIRA GANDHI'S PALMIST offers worlds of striking richness. From family lore marked by the 1947 partition of British India and the chaos that ensued, Kapur crafts a saga that is both personal and public. Her exploration of lives intersecting yet separated across time, culture, and continent reveals the many ways in which we carry, renounce, and rediscover the past. Kapur introduces us to an astonishing range of characters—a father who 'speaks five languages, quotes Frost as easily as Ghalib' ('Meat and Marry'); a mother and onetime nun who foreswore her 'Benedictine coif' for love ('Family Portrait, USA'); Cain and Abel of the Bib≤ Prince Arjuna of the Gita. At the heart of this quest, however, is an inquisitive mind examining our creation stories—personal, historical, and mythical. Through poems that are masterfully paced and densely layered, Kapur sets out to explore the tensions of our most basic human bonds: love and duty, violence and communion, family and nation."—Ned Balbo, contest judge
Women in the Waiting Room by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Main Library Reserves PS3611.A694 W664 2020ISBN: 9781625578235Publication Date: 2020-10-01"In astonishing lyrics that give us more than intimate negotiations of memory, the poems in Women in the Waiting Room work an entrancing weave of Hindu mythology, ravishing songs, and the language of crisis hotlines as a means of limning the fate of women' s bodies and psychological distress. If O' Hara's "Personism" figures a poem as a telephone call then Kapur's wondrous lines serve to heal, like all poignant and meaningful human to human exchanges: interventionist language that disrupts easy sanctuaries of meaning yet consoling in its artfulness. I call this life on the page, one you' ll be happy to encounter." --Major Jackson
"Women in the Waiting Room [is] a bold and bombastic assertion, a must-read for these times and beyond." --Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Dora Malech
Biography
Dora Malech’s most recent books of poetry include Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020) and Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018). Her fifth book of poetry, Trying ×Trying, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in Fall 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. With Laura T. Smith, she edited The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays (University of Iowa Press, 2023). With Gabriella Fee, she translated Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto’s Dolore Minimo (Saturnalia Books, 2022), which won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize. Malech has received an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among other honors. She is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.
On the Web
- https://www.doramalech.net/about.html
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/dora-malech
- https://writingseminars.jhu.edu/directory/dora-malech/
Selected Works
The American Sonnet by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Main Stacks PS593.S6 A44 2022ISBN: 9781609388713Publication Date: 2023-01-12Poet and scholar team Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith collect and foreground an impressive range of sonnets, including formal and formally subversive sonnets by established and emerging poets, highlighting connections across literary moments and movements. Poets include Phillis Wheatley, Fredrick Goddard Tuckerman, Emma Lazarus, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, Fradel Shtok, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dunstan Thompson, Rhina P. Espaillat, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Wanda Coleman, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, and Diane Seuss. The sonnets are accompanied by critical essays that likewise draw together diverse voices, methodologies, and historical and theoretical perspectives that represent the burgeoning field of American sonnet studies.
The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781609388720Publication Date: 2022
Dolore Minimo by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry PQ4922.I88 D6513 2022ISBN: 9781947817463Publication Date: 2022-10-15In Dolore Minimo, Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto attends to her own becoming in language both tender and fierce, painful and luminous. This collection, Vivinetto' s first, charts the course of her gender transition in poems that enact a mutually constitutive relationship between self and place, interrogating the foundations of physical, cultural, and emotional landscapes assumed or averred immutable. Her imagination is rooted in the Sicilian landscape of her native Siracusa, even as that ground shifts under foot in response to the poet' s own emotional and physical transformations. Vivinetto engages with classical mythology, Italian feminist theory, and received constructs of family, religion, and gender to explore the terrors and pleasures of a childhood that culminates in a second birth, in which she must be both mother and child. Fee and Malech' s collaborative translations reflect the polyvocal and processual qualities of Vivinetto' s poetry, using language that foregrounds an active liminality and expresses the multiplicities of the self in dynamic conversation over the course of the collection. In Dolore Minimo, the lyric " I" is a chorus, but an intimate one.
Flourish by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Main Library Reserves PS3613.A43523 A6 2020ISBN: 9780887486555Publication Date: 2020-02-18In Flourish, multiple meanings catch light--as the leaves of growing things might, or the facets of cut gemstones, or a signal mirror flashing in distress. These poems explore themes of thriving, growth, innovation, and survival, while immersing the reader in the pleasures of language itself--the "flourish" of linguistic gesture, play, form, turn, and adornment. Here, the lens zooms in and out to micro and macro levels, asking us to see the familiar with new eyes. The collection engages with the materials of the worlds we inhabit--natural worlds and those of our own making--and a full spectrum of poetry's own materials, building worlds of words and illuminating the shadowed terrain of our interior landscapes as well.
Say So by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry PS3613.A43523 S29 2011ISBN: 9781880834923Publication Date: 2010-11-29Poetry. The poems in SAY SO are at once rigorously formal and wildly experimental. Human utterance—be it prayer or plea or pun or turn of phrase or epithet—is one of SAY SO's primary pistons; poetic tradition—rhyme, meter, form, rhetoric—is another; the beauty and betrayals of the body, or bodies—echoed in the beauty and betrayal of language itself—is a third. Together, these forces provide the pressure that makes SAY SO move and brings these poems to life.
Shore Ordered Ocean by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry PS3613.A43523 S56 2009ISBN: 9781904130390Publication Date: 2009-11-07Poetry. By turns playful and serious, the poems in Dora Malech's long-awaited second collection, SHORE ORDERED OCEAN, revel in the inherent tensions and pleasures of sense, sound and syntax, reveal the resonance in the offhand utterance, seek the unexpected in aphorism and cliche and tap into the paradoxical freedom of formality. This is an extraordinary collection of highly idiosyncratic poems which explores place, politics, the body, love, art, and more. It is bound together by an urgent, physical and beguiling relationship with language itself.
Soundings by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry PS3613.A43523 S68 2019ISBN: 9781912475209Publication Date: 2019-12-01Soundings is Dora Malech's latest anthology of poems written in the last decade and appearing for the first time in a single volume. It includes works from her previously published books, Shore Ordered Ocean, Say So, and Stet.
Stet by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry PS3613.A43523 A6 2018ISBN: 9780691181448Publication Date: 2018-10-30In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body's bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Tapping the inventive possibilities of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram, Stet is a work of serious play that brings home the connections and intimacies of language.
Kiki Petrosino
Bibliography
Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released from Sarabande in 2022. She is a Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing programs. Petrosino is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship from MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, & the Spalding Prize, among other honors.
On the Web
- https://www.kikipetrosino.com/
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kiki-petrosino
- https://english.as.virginia.edu/people/profile/cmp2k
Selected Works
Black Genealogy by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry PS3616.E868 B53 2017ISBN: 9781942083733Publication Date: 2017-11-28At a literal crossroads in the South, there are two speakers in these poems: the descendant, who has traveled here to try to find her ancestors in the archives, records, and receipts of their violent and near-unrecorded history, and the ancestors, who are alternately bemused, angry, and tender with their descendant. Petrosino's poems argue with each other across time and seek to hear each other over the guardians and soldiers of the past who want to keep black genealogy from the descendants who would sing its truth. Interchapters illustrated by artist Lauren Haldeman reimagine the barriers of genealogical research as an enigmatic Confederate soldier with the disquieting habits and obstructive magicks of Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat.Timely, groundbreaking, and powerful, Kiki Petrosino's Black Genealogy has the weight of an instant classic.
Bright by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Main Stacks PS3616.E868 Z46 2022ISBN: 9781946448927Publication Date: 2022-08-09The highly anticipated, first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino. Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived between cultural worlds. "Bright," a slang term used to describe light-skinned people of interracial American ancestry, becomes the starting point for an extended meditation on the author's upbringing in a mixed Black and Italian American family. Alternating moments of memoir, archival research, close reading and reverie, this work contemplates the enduring, deeply personal legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination in America. Situated at the luminous crossroads where public and private histories collide, Bright asks important questions about love, heritage, identity and creativity.
Doubloon Oath by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry Chapbook PS3616.E868 D68 2016Publication Date: 2016
Fort Red Border by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Main Stacks PS3616.E868 F67 2009ISBN: 9781932511741Publication Date: 2009-08-01Kiki Petrosino has audacity to spare. She devotes the entire first section of her debut collection of poems to a putative affair the speaker is conducting with an imaginary Robert Redford. In the poems, Redford is solicitous of the speaker, as well as curious about her "difference," probing her about the various meanings of "natural" when applied to her African-American hair. The poems' hilarity and poignancy issue from the speaker's distance from, and yearning toward, the center of mainstream culture. Redford serves as ideal partner, the embodiment of American masculinity--but there is also an odd tenderness and actuality to the relationship. In these poems Petrosino is fearless, proceeding from the recognizable terrain of daily life's emotions rather than seeking refuge in the cool of mere obscurity. Petrosino's poems scout a new path, one that discovers a believably fierce, vivid, feeling self.
Hymn for the Black Terrific by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry PS3616.E868 H96 2013ISBN: 9781936747597Publication Date: 2013-07-30The poems in this, Kiki Petrosino's second collection, fulfill the promise of her debut effort, Fort Red Border, and further extend the terms of our expectations for this extraordinary young poet. The book is in two sections, the first a focused collection of wildly inventive lyrics that take as launch pad such far flung subjects as allergenesis, the contents and significance of swamps, a revised notion of marriage, and ancestors--both actual and dreamed. The eponymous second section is a cogent series, or long poem, based on a persona named "the eater," who, along with the poems themselves, storms voraciously through tablefuls of Chinese delicacies (each poem in the series takes its titles from an actual Chinese dish), as well as through doubts and confident proclamations from regions of an exploratory self. Hymn for the Black Terrific has Falstaffian panache; it is a book of pure astonishment.
White Blood by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry PS3616.E868 A6 2020ISBN: 9781946448545Publication Date: 2020-05-05In her fourth full-length book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem 'The Shop at Monticello,' she writes: 'I'm a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I'm a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.' Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino's name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.
Witch Wife by Call Number: Mount Holyoke College Stimson Room Poetry PS3616.E868 A6 2022ISBN: 9781956046106Publication Date: 2022-08-30"Petrosino is a canny, wide-ranging and formally nimble writer with a magician's command of atmosphere." --The New York Times, "The Best Poetry of 2017"
Witch Wife is back in a brand new paperback edition, featuring a reader's guide and writing prompts from the poet herself. The poems of Witch Wife are spells, obsessive incantations to exorcise or celebrate memory, to mourn the beloved dead, to conjure children or keep them at bay, to faithfully inhabit one's given body. In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history's ghosts--the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft--and sings them to life.
