Viewthe entire "Upstairs-at-the-Square" program featuring Kwame Dawes and current indie-music dominators Vampire Weekend from the Barnes & Noble union square event!.
Robert Pinsky and Derek Walcott anchor this groundbreaking, soulful poetry collection.
Contributors include: Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Martin Espada, Terrance Hayes, Valzyna Mort, Sonia Sanchez, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Patricia Smith, Saul Williams, Staceyann Chin, and 88 others.
Imagine a night of a hundred poets reading their work to an audience of intensely engaged, responsive, and lively people. Imagine the reading taking place under a tent pitched on a grassy lawn that overlooks the Caribbean Sea. Imagine the sun setting, imagine the scent of curried goat and fried fish wafting through the air, imagine the heat, imagine the cool tongue of wind off the sea, imagine a stage like an ancient shrine with a podium artfully pieced together with bamboo, strips of still green wood, leaves, twine, and shells. Imagine one hundred poets, some whose names you know and some you have never heard of, stepping onto the stage, opening their mouths and hearts, and singing out poems of such variety, complexity, beauty, and passion.
This is what a poetry reading at the Calabash International Literary Festival is like, and this new anthology provides readers a taste of what this festival offers year after year. This book is a treasure trove of beautiful poetry by writers who have come to love this festival and what it stands for. So Much Things to Say is the closest thing that you will get to actually sitting under that tent among a throng of people who understand themselves to be as much a part of the drama of a reading as the poet standing at the podium.
Edited by Kwame Dawes, one of the founders of the festival and its program director who has been largely responsible for the list of poets who have read at the festival, this is an exciting example of Calabash's commitment create a festival that is diverse, inspirational, earthy, and daring each May. This anthology is at once a celebration of ten years of a remarkable literary event as it is a gesture of love to seek ways to continue to fund and support this festival for the future. All profits from this publication will go toward the running of the festival, which remains free and open to the public.
Kwame Dawes (editor) was born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica. He is the author of many books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, criticism, and drama. His debut novel, She's Gone (Akashic), won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He is Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina where he directs the SC Poetry Initiative.
Click here to view Iron Balloons, the fiction anthology from Jamaica's Calabash Writer's Workshop.
Click here to view The Girl with the Golden Shoes, a novella by Colin Channer, festival co-organizer.
