HoCoPoLitSo

HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the October edition of the Wilde Readings Series, with Rahne Alexander and Maritza Rivera (or Mariposa), hosted by Linda Joy Burke. For 2024, please join us at our NEW venue, independent bookstore Queen Takes Book on Tuesday, October 8th at 7 p.m., at 6955 Oakland Mills Rd, Suite E, Columbia MD, 21045. Please spread the word— bring your friends, family and students! Light refreshments will be served and books by the readers available for sale.

An open mic follows the featured authors and we encourage you to participate. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time, about two poems. Sign up when you arrive, or in advance via this online form.

Below, get to know Rahne and Maritza!

Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?

Rahne: I don’t know if this is for me to say! My recent MFA project was centered on my mother, so the last several years, she’s been the dominant force. In the wake of that project, I’ve been thinking about so many of my mentors, those who nurtured me in some way—materially, culturally, spiritually or otherwise. But over the years I’ve also spent a lot of time and energy writing about jerks. Are any of them the same guy? I’ll never tell.

Maritza: My grandmother, AKA abuela, was a very influential figure in my life and often appears in my work.

Where is your favorite place to write?

Rahne: They used to have these places called cafés where you could sit at a little table and order coffee all day long. Some of them would even be open until midnight! There were a whole bunch of them, each with a different vibe and it was great. You could go there with your little moleskine notebook and look off into the mid-distance, maybe order a little sandwich or a pastry. Then Starbucks came along and now every place closes at 3 p.m.

Maritza: On the beach in Puerto Rico, my happy place.

Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?

Rahne: I have a tried and true ritual: I start by checking my to-do calendar so I can remember how much past deadline I am and rekindle how bad I feel about myself. Then I take the empty glasses and plates from my desk to the kitchen where I do some dishes, and the running water makes me need to run to the bathroom, which pressingly needs cleaning and if so I do that too. Since I’m going back downstairs anyway I take a load of laundry to the basement where, what the heck, since I’m down here why not get a load started. Then I go back up to the kitchen where I get that kombucha I drank half of yesterday and return up to my desk, where an email has arrived that I must respond to forthwith, and so I do. Then I’m tired. I go lie down for a moment to rest my strained eyes, but also maybe it’s my turn on my favorite little word game app which is called WELDER, and the cat comes along for a snuggle and she insists I put my phone down to pet her. I doze off for five to thirty minutes and wake with a start — the cat is gone and my phone battery is drained. I plug in my phone, return the warmed kombucha to the fridge and start a coffee to perk me up. While the water boils, I go down to switch over the laundry, bring up a load of clothes from the dryer, and then I’m usually ready to write, immediately after I check Twitter.

Maritza: I don’t really have a ritual except that I write everything by hand first. I then type and edit on the computer. I wrote a poem once about Rita Dove’s ritual but I don’t have one like hers.

Who always gets a first read?

Rahne: It’s usually just me, and in the best of cases, the audience. Since the days of dial-up BBSes through blogging and microblogging to now, I love going direct to the audience. When I hit that sweet spot, the cathexis between performance and writing—for me, that’s where the magic is.

Maritza: My children, Maria Teresa and Antonio Roberto are always the first to read and hear my poetry. They don’t cringe and run away anymore. LOL!

What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?

Rahne: I don’t re-read books very often, so it’s funny to be asked that at this moment, in which I’m concurrently re-reading three. I was recently given a 1928 reprint of Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope so I’ve been spending time with some of my oldest favorite poems; and I’m revisiting Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower because that story began in 2024. I’ve also been re-reading James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, his memoir of the cinema. It’s among my favorites of his writings.

Maritza: Pinecrest Rest Haven by Grace Cavalieri and Meeting Bone Man by Joseph Ross. Please don’t make me choose.

What is the most memorable reading you have attended?

Rahne: There are so many I could mention here, so I’ll keep to the one that came to mind first, which was seeing Diane DiPrima at Bookshop Santa Cruz circa 2000. She was spectacular, and helped clarify my perspective on the beat poets.

Maritza: When Grace Cavalieri read from Pinecrest Rest Haven at The Writer’s Center, I laughed and cried. It was very emotional for me. This was many years ago but when I think about it, I still feel the impact of her words.

• Rahne Alexander is an intermedia artist and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. She holds an MFA in Intermedia+Digital Arts from UMBC, and her visual and performance works have been exhibited across the U.S. and around the world. Her writing has appeared in BmoreArt, The Hopkins Review and the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica. Her essay chapbook Heretic to Housewife was awarded the 2019 OutWrite nonfiction prize.

Rahne can be found on most social media platforms as @rahnealexander. Her personal website, which is going through some changes as of this writing, is rahne.com, and she publishes a blog called Paradise Is Not For Sale.

• Marita Rivera, AKA Mariposa is a Puerto Rican poet and Army veteran who resides in Rockville, MD and San Juan, PR. She has been writing poetry for over fifty years and is the creator of a short form of poetry called Blackjack. Maritza is the author of About You; A Mother’s War; Baker’s Dozen; Twenty-One: Blackjack Poems and the Blackjack Poetry Playing Cards. Since 2011, she hosts the Mariposa Poetry Retreat and the Mariposa Reunion Reading. Her work appears in literary magazines, online publications, and the public arts project, Meet Me At the Triangles located in Wheaton, MD. In 2022 Maritza and Jeffrey Banks co-edited Diaspora Café: DC, an Afro-LatinX anthology published by Day Eight. In 2023 she translated the poetry collection, Inquilinos Mudos/Silent Tenents by Alberto Roblest from Spanish into English.

Maritza is on Facebook under her name, The Blackjack Poets Group and the Mariposa Poetry Retreat. Poems from A Mother’s War can be found on milspeak.org.

On November 19th, 1974, Lucille Clifton joined Carolyn Kizer to headline HoCoPoLitSo’s first-ever event, reading from their work and discussing their lives as writers to adult and student audiences in Wilde Lake. Lucille would go on to be Poet Laureate of Maryland, 1979–1985, and a cherished long-time friend and artistic advisor to HoCoPoLitSo. Since her passing in 2010, HoCoPoLitSo has held the annual Lucille Clifton Reading Series, each year highlighting poets, topics, and partners that Lucille would have been proud to champion, as we are proud to open our 50th anniversary season in her memory.

We hope you will join us for our 2024 Lucille Reading Series offering: Writing the Land, presented in partnership with Howard County Conservancy. The event features poet Patti Ross, who through the national Writing the Land project wrote two poems for the Conservancy and its land, reading from her work along with poets Naomi Ayala and Hiram Larew. All three will read nature poems in the Conservancy’s garden amphitheater, amid the beauty of our natural environment. A print anthology featuring Ross’s poetry and essays about the Conservancy, will be available for purchase and signing. Wine and apple cider will be sold.

📅 Sunday, October 27
🕜 1 p.m. (in-person)
📍 10520 Old Frederick Road, Woodstock, MD 21163

FREE registration is required to attend this public event to ensure adequate seating:
http://bit.ly/writingtheland

The Howard County Poetry and Literature Society this year celebrates its 50th anniversary of presenting nationally— and internationally— renowned literary artists and emerging writers to our local and worldwide audiences. In that half-century of service to the community, we at HoCoPoLitSo are perhaps most proud of our youth- and student-focused offerings, and our enduring partnerships with Howard County schools going back to our founding in 1974. Each year, HoCoPoLitSo invites an active professional writer to participate in a residency in Howard County, visiting county students for readings and workshops in their classrooms. More than 30 authors of diverse backgrounds have taken part in what is today the Bauder Writer-in-Residence program, offering visits to all 13 Howard County public high schools, the Homewood Center, and Howard Community College.

This year’s writer-in-residence, Tope Folarin, kicked off his season of presentations for the 2024–2025 academic year on August 19th, at Howard County Public Schools’ Professional Learning Day, speaking to an engaged audience of professional educators on the winding path that led him to find his literary voice, and his excitement to help young aspiring writers find their own. Susan Thornton Hobby, HoCoPoLitSo’s recording secretary, attended the session and penned the following.

Author Tope Folarin describes parts of his life as “the craziest kind of whiplash.” Here’s just a little of his life story, which he told to county English teachers and others at their professional development day on August 19 as part of his introduction as this year’s Bauder Writer-in-Residence.

Folarin’s Nigerian parents move to Utah, where he and his brother are born. His mother falls ill and returns to Nigeria and the Folarin boys spend their early years in a mostly White, mostly Mormon area, being raised by their father. Soon they were moving across the country following their father’s search for a job.

Folarin wins a scholarship to Morehouse University. After a semester in Capetown, he loses his scholarship on a technicality and survives on friends’ couches. One day, watching Spike Lee’s Malcom X movie from one of those couches, he notices a list of funders in the credits and writes appeal letters to every one. Oprah Winfrey responds and pays for him to complete his senior year at Morehouse.

After earning two master’s degrees (Public Policy and African Studies) at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, Folarin writes a thesis on the immigrant experience, which makes its way to a friend-of-a-friend at Google. Folarin is hired and works for two years at Google. In his free time he writes about his childhood, eventually realizing that his writing “wants” to be a novel about a young Nigerian man raised in Utah. He quits his job at Google to focus on fiction and racks up 543 rejections for his work. He shoves a short story into the hands of a writer he’s interviewing, who submits the story to a contest. Folarin wins the Caine Prize for African Writing. Then his semi-autobiographical novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, wins the Whiting Prize for Fiction.

Whiplash, indeed.

HoCoPoLitSo has brought more than 30 renowned authors into Howard County schools, in an effort to show students that authors are real people. Folarin, who is now the executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies, as well as the Lannan Creative Writing Visiting Lecturer at Georgetown University, couldn’t be more real.

Now, he’ll be talking with students about writing, about his life, and about finding their own voices, like he found his. “All your life is grist,” Folarin told the teachers. He’d like to tell their students how to write their own compelling stories. “I support the idea of radical freedom when you’re writing.”

To learn more about the writer-in-residence, or to schedule a visit to your own classroom, please contact HoCoPoLitSo’s High School Liaison Judy Young, at judy_young@hcpss.org, or contact the HoCoPoLitSo offices at info@hocopolitso.org, or by phone, (443)518-4568 during regular business hours. An interview with Folarin will be published in January in the Little Patuxent Review.

Out of consideration for the busyness at the start of the academic year among many writers, the deadline for application to the 2024 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize has been extended to Tuesday, October 15th, at 11:59 p.m. There is no change in the date of the award, which will be communicated by no later than November 15th. We hope that you will join us in sharing your words.

Held annually in loving memory of HoCoPoLitSo’s co-founder, the 2024 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize is open to all entrants— whether you are a life-time poet or have never written a line before, we invite you to share with us whatever moves you to poetry.

The author of the poem selected for first place will be awarded a cash prize of $500, celebrated on HoCoPoLitSo’s website, social media, and in our annual report— and have their winning poem published in The Little Patuxent Review and right here on HoCoPoLitSo’s front page.

To enter, click here, or visit the contest’s page to learn more or to read past winners’ poems. A reading fee of $10 per entrant supports a panel of fair and balanced judges.

Following the announcement of Truth Thomas as the inaugural adult poet laureate of Howard County at the Blackbird Poetry Festival this past April, HoCoPoLitSo— together with our partners at Howard County Arts Council and the Office of County Executive Calvin Ball— invites one and all to attend the announcement of the first local young writer to be selected as Howard County Youth Poet Laureate, to be held Monday, September 23rd, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at Busboys and Poets in Columbia.

The Youth Poet Laureate program, announced in fall of 2023, is an honorary one-year position selecting a young author from the Howard County area, ages 14–21, who demonstrates a passion for poetry and its power to connect our communities through local public readings and participation in civic events. Applications were accepted April to May this year, and reviewed by an independent panel organized by HoCoPoLitSo and made up of local poets and educators Joseph Ross, Naomi Ayala, and Steven Leyva. Acting on the panel’s recommendation, the Youth Poet Laureate will be formally appointed by the County Executive to act as an ambassador for literacy, arts, and youth expression.

This event is free and open to the public, but requires registration to attend: please click here to register.

HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the September edition of the Wilde Readings Series, with Austin S. Camacho and Grace Cavalieri, hosted by Ann Bracken. For 2024, please join us at our NEW venue, independent bookstore Queen Takes Book on Tuesday, September 10th at 7 p.m., at 6955 Oakland Mills Rd, Suite E, Columbia MD, 21045. Please spread the word— bring your friends, family and students! Light refreshments will be served and books by the readers available for sale.

An open mic follows the featured authors and we encourage you to participate. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time, about two poems. Sign up when you arrive, or in advance via this online form.

Below, get to know Austin and Grace!

Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?

Austin: I’ve never used real people in my writing although, I will admit that my fictional private detective Hannibal Jones is at least partly based on my son Adam.

Grace: Husband Ken Flynn.

Where is your favorite place to write?

Austin: In my home office at my big, glass-topped desk. But I can write anyplace as long there’s a chair that gives me good support and it’s quiet enough to hear the tunes in my earbuds.

Grace: In bed or at desk.

Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?

Austin: Earbuds in place and a small bowl of snacks to nibble on (usually cashews.)

Grace: silence

Who always gets a first read?

Austin: I always make the offer to my wife but most often it’s members of my critique group.

Grace: I do not share.

What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?

Austin: I rarely re-read a book but The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler is one of the few exceptions.

Grace: Beloved.

What is the most memorable reading you have attended?

Austin: A Noir at the Bar in Washington DC which included James Grady, S.A. Cosby and Cheryl Head. Three absolute masters of crime fiction!

Grace: Louise Gluck at the Library of Congress.

• Austin S. Camacho is the author of eight novels about Washington DC-based private eye Hannibal Jones, five in the Stark and O’Brien international thriller series, and the detective novel, Beyond Blue. His short stories have been featured in several anthologies. He is featured in the Edgar-nominated African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study by Frankie Y. Bailey, and helps produce the Creatures, Crimes & Creativity literary conference here in Columbia.

His personal homepage is https://ascamacho.com, and he can also be found on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The C3 con is scheduled to be the weekend of September 13–15 at the Doubletree Hilton Hotel in Columbia.

• Grace Cavalieri was Maryland’s tenth poet laureate (2018–2024). She founded and still produces “the Poet and the Poem” for public radio, now from the Library of Congress, celebrating 47 years on-air in 2024. She holds two Allen Ginsberg Awards; The Paterson Award; the AWP George Garrett, Columbia, Bordighera, AAUW Awards; National Commission on Working Women Award, and the CPB Silver Medal, plus others. She’s an Academy of American Poets Fellow. Her podcasts were sent to the moon.

Grace can be found online at https://gracecavalieri.com, which also hosts an extensive backlog of her writer-to-writer interview podcast, “The Poet and the Poem.”

Coming next month, on September 19th, 2024, HoCoPoLitSo proudly presents in partnership with Howard Community College and the Howard County Library System, the 2024 installment of the Bauder Lecture Series, featuring a keynote from Elizabeth Acevedo, distinguished bestselling author of “Clap When You Land,” followed by an in-depth conversation hosted by celeste doaks, editor, journalist, and author of “Cornrows and Cornfields.”

Join us for this free and public event, in person at the Horowitz Visual and Performing Arts Center on the HCC campus, or online streamed live via Vimeo at this link. The hybrid event will include sign-language interpretation for patrons joining us both in person and via Vimeo. The day’s events begin with a reading, keynote and stage conversation at 12:30 p.m., followed by a brief reception; a second session follows at 6:00 p.m. HoCoPoLitSo offers books from both authors for purchase and signing, to in-person attendees following both presentations.

In Clap When You Land, Camino Rios lives in the Dominican Republic and yearns to go to Columbia University in New York City, where her father works most of the year. Yahaira Rios, who lives in New York City, hasn’t spoken to her dad since the previous summer, when she found out he has another wife in the Dominican Republic. Their lives collide when this man, their dad, dies in an airplane crash with hundreds of other passengers heading to the island.

Elizabeth Acevedo is the New York Times-bestselling author of “The Poet X“, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of numerous other titles including “Family Lore“; “With the Fire on High“, which was named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal; and “Clap When You Land“, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus finalist. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem, Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. In 2022, The Poetry Foundation selected Elizabeth Acevedo as the Young People’s Poet Laureate. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC with her husband.

celeste doaks is the author of “Cornrows and Cornfields“, and editor of the poetry anthology “Not Without Our Laughter.” Her chapbook, “American Herstory“, was Backbone Press’s first-place winner in 2018. Herstory contains poems—which have been featured at the Whitney Museum of American art, Brooklyn Museum, and most recently the Smithsonian American Art Museum— about the artwork former First Lady Michelle Obama chose for the White House. doaks is a Carolina African American Writers’ Collective (CAAWC) member and has received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Atlantic Center of the Arts, Community of Writers Squaw Valley, and the Fine Arts Work Center. doaks is a three-time Pushcart award nominee and a creative writing professor for over a decade. Her poems, reviews, and cultural essays have appeared in multiple US and UK on-line and print publications including “Ms. Magazine”, “The Rumpus”, “The Millions”, “Huffington Post”, “Chicago Quarterly Review”, “Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora”, “The Hopkins Review, Bmore Art Magazine”, “Asheville Poetry Review” and many others.

The annual Bauder Lecture Series is made possible by a generous grant from Dr. Lillian Bauder, a community leader and Columbia resident. Each year, the Howard County Book Connection— a partnership of HoCoPoLitSo and representatives from most departments of Howard Community College— selects one book, whose author is invited to headline the lecture; HoCoPoLitSo provides for a local author to join as a special guest, moderating an on-stage writer-to-writer conversation, and audience Q&A. In addition, up to two Howard Community College students are honored with the presentation of the Don Bauder Awards, for their response to the chosen book in an essay or other creative format. The awards honor the memory of Don Bauder, late husband of Dr. Lillian Bauder and a champion of civil rights and social justice causes.

For more information, or to view recordings of past years’ lectures, please visit Howard Community College’s Bauder Lecture Series event listing, or the home page of the Howard County Book Connection.

Nigerian American Author Tope Folarin Will Visit High Schools and Homewood

The Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo) has selected Nigerian American author Tope Folarin as its 33rd Writer-in-Residence. A Rhodes Scholar, he is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.

The writer-in-residence program was designed to give students access to a professional writer who visits each school to read and discuss poetry and literature, the writing life, and selected works. Since its official launch 33 years ago, thousands of students have benefited from the program, which since 2020 is made possible through the generous support of Dr. Lillian Bauder.

Folarin serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and is the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. His reviews, essays and cultural criticism have been featured in The Atlantic, The Baffler, BBC, The Drift, High Country News, Lithub, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Vulture, The Washington Post and elsewhere.

“For the past 50 years, HoCoPoLitSo has distinguished itself with world-class literary programs. We are calling our anniversary year ‘Beyond Words, Beyond Borders’ in recognition of our desire to expand understanding and response to universal truths as expressed in the literature of extraordinary writers and thinkers, such as Tope Folarin,” said HoCoPoLitSo Co-Chair Tim Singleton.

Folarin joins a roster of accomplished poets, writers, and memoirists who have served local students at Howard County’s 13 high schools, the Homewood Center, and Howard Community College, through the Howard County Public School System’s partnership with HoCoPoLitSo, which began with a reading at Wilde Lake High School by poets Lucille Clifton and Carolyn Kizer in 1974. HoCoPoLitSo is celebrating its 50^th anniversary of bringing renowned literary artists and emerging writers to the community to meet in-person with audiences of all ages.

“In addition to being an accomplished writer and a teacher of creative writing at Georgetown University, Tope Folarin is an outstanding human being with a real interest in young people,” said retired Howard County educator Judy R. Young, the liaison between HoCoPoLitSo and the school system.

In addition to the 2024–2025 schools-based residency of Folarin, HoCoPoLitSo anniversary year programs will include a presentation featuring national Young People’s Poet Laureate Elizabeth Acevedo in partnership with Howard Community College’s Bauder Lecture Series; the “Writing the Land” reading in partnership with Howard County Conservancy; the 47^th Annual Evening of Irish Music and Poetry showcasing writer Seán Hewitt; and collaborations with Howard Community College’s Blackbird Poetry Festival and Downtown Columbia Partnership’s Books in Bloom book festival.

“HoCoPoLitSo makes and holds space within our community for people to come together in recognition of our human need to connect through language, ideas, and common experiences. Literature is not only educational but enlightening, enlarging, elevating and enjoyable. We greet each other in fields of words and learn we are not alone,” said HoCoPoLitSo Co-Chair Tara Hart.