Wednesday, October 6, 2021
Kekla Magoon had just picked up groceries to cook dinner on Monday evening when she saw that she had missed a phone call.
“I didn’t even hear the phone ring,” the Montpelier author said on Wednesday. She was in the grocery store parking lot when she noticed a voicemail from a 212 number.
“I figured that might be related to publishing, so I listened,” she said. “And it was the executive director of the National Book Foundation.”
Magoon is one of five finalists for the 2021 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for her forthcoming nonfiction book Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party's Promise to the People. “It’s pretty exciting,” she said. “A little surreal, also.”
She had known since September that she was on the long list for the prize, and she knew that the foundation planned to announce all 25 National Book Award finalists — five in each of five categories — on Tuesday, October 5, at 10 a.m. She hadn’t expected to hear anything until then. In a long “congratulatory voicemail with some logistics information,” foundation executive director Ruth Dickey asked Magoon to keep the news quiet and not to tell even her publisher.
Tags: National Book Award , Kekla Magoon , Vermont College of Fine Arts , author , children's book , Web Only , Image
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
Revolution in Our Time, which will be released on Tuesday, November 23, traces the Black Panther Party through its social and historical contexts, from slavery to the group's inception in 1966 to today's ongoing anti-racist efforts.
Tags: Kekla Magoon , Black Panther Party , National Book Award , Web Only , Image
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Tags: Vermont Book Award , Vermont Department of Libraries , Vermont Humanities Council , Jason Lutes , Martin Philip , Flying Pig Bookstore , Web Only , Image
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
Zencey was a scholar dedicated to advancing the idea of ecological economics, according to Taylor Ricketts, director of the Gund Institute. That means an approach to economics that “acknowledges the self-evident fact that the economy is operating inside the biosphere,” Ricketts explained. In other words, the economy is one system within a larger planetary system, and economic growth is limited by the physical limits of the environment.
Tags: Gund Institute , University of Vermont , Eric Zencey , Taylor Ricketts , Bathsheba Demuth , ecology , economics , environment , environmental history , Web Only , Image
Friday, December 4, 2020
The online event is a kind of literary "Dear Abby." It takes place on author Stephen Kiernan’s Facebook page, where he offers recommendations to holiday shoppers seeking his advice about books for people on their gift lists.
Tags: Stephen Kiernan , holiday gifts , books , Facebook , reading , novels , Santa , Web Only , Image
Friday, October 23, 2020
Jackson, a poet, was a young faculty member joining the English department from Xavier University in New Orleans. Fogel, a Henry James scholar and university administrator, arrived from Louisiana State University to serve as UVM’s 25th president. The two met that fall at an English department picnic, recalled Fogel, who’s now a professor in the department.
“I met Major, read some of his poems, and immediately began [working] from the president’s office and made sure that we retained him as long as we could,” Fogel said.
That effort was successful for nearly two decades: Jackson, 52, will leave UVM at the end of the semester for Vanderbilt University, where he’ll be the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English. During his tenure at UVM, Jackson emerged as a prominent American poet of his generation, publishing four volumes of poetry, including this year’s The Absurd Man, and editing the 2019 volume of The Best American Poetry.
Tags: Major Jackson , University of Vermont , Vanderbilt University , poetry , writer , books , Web Only , Image
Thursday, October 8, 2020
Glück served as Vermont’s poet laureate — known then as “state poet” — from 1994 to 1998, and as U.S. poet laureate 2003 to 2004.
Tags: Louise Glück , poems , poetry , Nobel Prize , Swedish Academy , Vermont , Web Only , Image
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
A path is for sharing. Along a path in Burlington's Leddy Park, trees share the way with a children’s book, Pie is for Sharing.
The pages of the book are displayed on a set of posts at the edge of the path. As you walk the path you can read the book — a combination of activities known as StoryWalk.
Pie is for Sharing, a lovely book written by Stephanie Parsley Ledyard, is illustrated by Jason Chin, a children’s book artist and author who lives in South Burlington. He encountered his first StoryWalk about a decade ago at a zoo in New York City and has been a fan since.
In a phone call with Seven Days, Chin talked about why he likes StoryWalk, including the enjoyment of coming upon one when he’s out with his kids.
Tags: StoryWalk , Jason Chin , Burlington , Leddy Park , Oakledge Park , Fletcher Free Library , reading , books , kids , Web Only , Image
Monday, September 14, 2020
Virtual Bookstock kicks off on Thursday, September 17, and continues monthly through the end of the year. The first guest is poet Reuben Jackson, in conversation with author Jenna Blum.
Tags: Bookstock , Reuben Jackson , Jason Lutes , Francois Clemmons , Nikita Stewart , poetry , literature , Web Only , Image
Thursday, July 30, 2020
In early May, organizers, including project initiator and 350Vermont staff collective member Lily Jacobson, put out a call for submissions. They were looking for stories, essays, poems, drawings, photos, and other types of writing and visual art to fill a DIY publication, serving as "an artistic dialogue around the connections between COVID-19 and climate justice, aka the climate crisis," according to the call for submissions.
The response was enthusiastic. In a phone call with Seven Days, Jacobson said the team received submissions from 40 people, some of whom sent multiple pieces. With such a large number of works, organizers decided to parcel the zine, called Climate + COVID-19: A Community Conversation, into two issues.
Tags: 350Vermont , Climate Crisis , COVID-19 , zine , Web Only , Image