I’ll be joining fellow UNCW grads Jake Hinkson and Sneza Zabic this Wednesday in Chicago for a reading and talk at City News Cafe. Come say hello. Have some scones. Find out if geography really is destiny, and then stay for some music.
“South by Midwest,” hosted by Packingtown Review.
Here’s a photo of me and Jake looking authorial:
I’m not a poet, but I’m looking forward to attending the New Orleans Poetry Festival, April 20-22, at the Healing Center here in, of course, New Orleans.
Saturday evening, I’ll be on a panel with writers Katy Simpson Smith, Kalamu Salaam, and Kristina Kay Robinson, talking about “Lonely Voices: Storytelling, Character, and Place.”
And then much later that night, if you’re lucky, you might catch me playing drums at the “Poets with Bands” after-hours party at Siberia Lounge down the street on St. Claude.
Here’s a picture of my drums:
A lovely short video from Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh. Amateur astronomer Overstreet set up his telescope outside on the streets of Los Angeles and let strangers look through it. They were all amazed by what they saw. “Oh my god. That’s the moon?”
Says Overstreet, “It makes you realize that we’re all on a small little planet, and we all have the same reaction to the universe we live in. . . . It’s a great reminder that we should look up more often.”
More here, from The Atlantic:
On a whim, Wylie Overstreet set up his telescope outside his apartment. He wanted to look at the moon. He had no idea he would, in a matter of hours, inspire awe in hundreds of strangers on the streets of Los Angeles. “It’s incredible how many people have never looked through a telescope,” Alex Gorosh, a friend of Overstreet’s, told The Atlantic.“Many people thought the image wasn’t real—they thought we were playing a prank on them.”
Overstreet and Gorosh were so taken by strangers’ reactions to the moon through their telescope that the friends began to set it up in different locations across the city, filming as they went. “That’s when we recognized the powerful message of unity that we were capturing,” said Gorosh.
Their resulting film, A New View of the Moon, is a simple tribute to human wonder. Like last year’s total solar eclipse, Overstreet and Gorosh witnessed how a cosmic event has the power to bring people together. “It’s about taking a step back and appreciating the beauty and grandeur of the natural world around us,” said Gorosh. “It sounds cheesy, but if we were able to do that more often, it would be much easier to work through the divisions that we’re facing as a culture.”