Saturday, May 14, 2016

Sarah Sutro, Etudes

cover painting by Sarah Sutro 
Sarah Sutro is a poet and painter. A finalist for the Robert Frost Poetry Award and MA Artist Foundation Poetry Grant, she has been a Pollack Krasner Foundation Award recipient and a visiting writer/artist at the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, Millay and Ossabaw Island Colonies. A faculty and  visiting professor at several colleges and universities, including Emerson College, University of Massachusetts, Cornell University and Lesley University, she is also the author of COLORS:  Passages through Art, Asia and Nature (Blue Asia Press 2010).

Études, her first poetry book, has just been published by Finishing Line Press. The San Francisco poet Edward Mycue writes of the poems as including "bold objects, strong colors, landscapes, patterns, noises felt as elemental, windy, hot experiences, readers' leaps...." Kathleen Aguero, author of After That, comments, "With an artist’s eye and a poet’s voice, Sarah Sutro celebrates the ephemeral....this poet is always looking, catching the fleeting moments between one state and another." 

We have read Etudes and find the poems wonderful. Sutro is a poet seeing the world through a painter's eye, with many references to colors filling the lines. Behind many poets we find the desire to be a visual artist. Poet Theodore Roethke, for example, worked on a series of drawings inspired by his friend the artist Morris Graves, which were never shown. In Sutro's case we are fortunate to be able to see her paintings as well as read her poems. 

SG

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to order on Amazon

Etudes

Mar 17, 2016
by Sarah Sutro






Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Rejection Letter Haikus



B Prompts is a writing collaboration by affiliates of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program including current undergraduate concentration majors, MFA, and Ph.D students, alumni, and faculty. Participants are asked to respond to specific writing prompts that inspire a new way of thinking about an element of writing. While our participants take their craft seriously, our prompts often encourage witty and humorous responses accentuated by visual elements. We seek to create work that is accessible and fun while honoring the potential of language, text, and image.

Rejection Haikus is the inaugural project of B Prompts and features work by Robert Boswell (University of Houston Creative Writing Faculty who has had two plays produced and is the author of three short story collections, two books of nonfiction and seven novels, the most recent of which is “Tumbledown”); Carol Cao (undergraduate concentration graduate ’15); Jennifer Lowe (Ph.D candidate and author of “Doe: A Lyric Novel”); Jeni McFarland (MFA ’16 graduate); David Stuart MacLean (Ph.D ’09 graduate and the author of “The Answer to the Riddle is Me”); and Nathan Stabenfeldt (MFA candidate). 

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