The Quarry's Top 10 Most-Viewed Poems of 2017

In 2017, readers turned most often to ten poems that affirm our humanity, mourn our wounds and loss, and that speak to us of reunion and joyful rebellion.

We are delighted to present the ten most-viewed poems published in Split This Rock’s social justice poetry database, The Quarry, in 2017. They represent this country’s greatest strength – the variety of our residents' backgrounds and the clarifying views they offer on living this human and troubled American life. In 2017 the all-time most read poems changed to the top two poems of 2017. Previously the All Time Number 1 Poem was Ross Gay’s “A Small Needful Fact,”and still holds at Number 3 since The Quarry went online. You may read previous collections of most-viewed poems on Blog This Rock.

Many of these top ten poems also happen to connect to Split This Rock’s history and directly to our work in 2017. Amanda Gorman, the first US Youth Poet Laureate, offered her inaugural poem for Poem of the Week. Melissa Tuckey is a co-founder of the organization, and the poems by Keno Evol, Purvi Shah, and Keith Wilson all placed in the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest in 2017.  Richard Blanco featured at Richard Blanco featured at Split This Rock’s fifth anniversary celebration, and Aracelis Girmay featured at the poetry festival in 2016. Both of their poems were part of a special portfolio edition of Poem of the Week published on inauguration day 2017.

Kazim Ali will feature at this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, DC from April 19 through April 21, along with Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora! We do hope you can join us. Early bird rates are available until February 23! Visit Split This Rock's website for details.

2017’s most-viewed poems run the gamut from mourning to celebration. These poems mourn our distance from the future world we deserve. These poems provoke us to embrace and behold each other. These poems witness the way to a future we know is possible. That future is a social world organized with our dignity at its center. That future ennobles us, lets us live in cooperation with nature, in our varied and glorious bodies, sustained by the many shapes and textures of our love. That future lets us share stories and languages and practices, lets us share all of them knowing they will be honored for the sacred inheritance they are.

In these ten poems, and all the poems of The Quarry, we can hear intimations of the future we mean to live, we can hear her warm breath singing full-throated and ready.

  

1   Declaration of Interdependence, by Richard Blanco

2   YOU ARE WHO I LOVE, by Aracelis Girmay

3   Do You Speak Persian, by Kaveh Akbar

4   Politics of an Elegy, by Hieu Mihn Nguyen

5   In This Place (An American Lyric), by Amanda Gorman

6   Shooting for the Sky, by Purvi Shah

7   Requiem, Melissa Tuckey

8   Peach, by Kazim Ali

9   Black Matters, by Keith Wilson

10 On Meeting a Brother for the First Time, by Keno Evol

We invite readers to find these poem in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, along with their 475-plus kin, to find in these poems the sense of belonging that fuels the long work of resistance and imagination. The poems are searchable by social justice theme and indexed to encourage discovery.

We hear of the poems being used by teachers in classrooms, for writing workshops, in vigils, performances, worship services, and more! The poems are traveling the country and the world with their witness and their provocation. Everywhere these poems are read, they insist that the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of is not a lost idea and that our path to a just and thriving world begins with seeing each other clearly, with generous vision.

In Split This Rock’s tenth anniversary year, we are firming up plans to expand The Quarry’s reach even further, so it continues to function not only as a repository of excellent poetry, but as an active tool for those who seek to make justice present in our time. We’re always open to innovative ideas from Splitistas– for organizing, teaching, worship, reflection. Email your story of using The Quarry to info@splitthisrock.org.

M. F. Simone Roberts
Managing Editor of The Quarry
Split This Rock Poetry & Social Justice Fellow

2018 Pushcart Nominations from Split This Rock!

Split This Rock is very pleased to announce our nominations for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. We are inspired by these six poets and their poems of witness! 

These poems -- some which were published as part of a special Inauguration Day Poem of the Week collection -- offer fuel for truth-telling and protest, for beckoning a new world that celebrates us all, for the rally and comfort of solidarity. 

.......... Richard Blanco, Declaration of Inter-Dependence
              Aracelis Girmay, YOU ARE WHO I LOVE
.......... Minal Hajratwala, ‘I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me’...........
.......... Danez Smith, Our Moveable Mecca
.......... Vincent Toro, Vox Populi for the Marooned
              Sally Wen Mao, Aubade with Gravel and Gold

The selected poems, like the six we nominated for Best of the Net 2017, are poems we return to over and over to keep us refreshed, focused, and awake to possibility in these difficult times. We hope they nourish you as well!

***

You may visit these and over 475 other poems of provocation and witness in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database -- a searchable collection of poems by a diverse array of contemporary socially engaged poets, published by Split This Rock since 2009. Like all of Split This Rock’s programs, The Quarry is designed to bring poetry fully to the center of public life.

Searchable by social justice theme, author’s identity, state, and geographic region, this database is a unique, rich resource. The Quarry offers poems that will inform and inspire you, your peers, and all with whom you work and collaborate. 

You might not only read these poems but use them to keep yourself grounded, to open meetings, to share among discussion groups, to email to representatives to encourage them to keep working for the general welfare, or to share with those who might benefit from perspectives different from their own. 

Statement by Split This Rock in Solidarity with Charlottesville and All Those Working to End White Supremacy

At Split This Rock we are heartsick at the murder and other violence committed by white supremacist nationalists over the weekend in Charlottesville, VA. We know these actions are of a piece with our nation’s long bloody history of genocide and exploitation. And we know that one of the powerful tools of repression is silencing, in this case insisting that the American story is the story of whiteness.

As ever, poets are rewriting that narrative.

The poets of the Split This Rock community come from the groups white supremacists aim to silence, dominate, or destroy outright: we are queer, we are people of color, we are people with disabilities, we are women, we are people of many faiths and no faith, we are white allies, and we are progressives. 

We are powerful visionaries and chroniclers, we are fierce advocates and activists. Split This Rock poets have long offered necessary poetic witness of, and protest against, both the oppression advocated by racist and anti-Semitic neo-Nazis and their ilk and the harm we suffer at the hands of racist institutions.

In this terrible moment, in support of all who seek a world free of hatred and oppression, we offer selected poems from The Quarry, excerpted below, in praise of resistance and social justice movements -- tinged with hurt, hope, and joy -- reminders of our communities’ resilience. 

Photo by Eze Amos: ezeamosphotography.com

We offer these poems to nourish liberation and justice movements and to sustain you, the brave Americans who join them and lead them. We offer these poems as a call to renew and deepen -- yet again -- our commitments to each other and to our claims to the American story.

Should you want them as well, The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database is also home to many powerful poems that address themes of racism, violence, police brutality, and the several intersecting injustices that affect our communities and our earth. We offer too the YouTube channels of Split This Rock and the DC Youth Slam Team, where you’ll find performances of striking power and beauty. Please feel free to share all these resources.

Solidarity events are everywhere this week. Find one near you at the website of Indivisible. You can organize your own and register it on their website as well. Bring a poem to read – one offered below or one of your own or any that speaks the grief, power, and resilience you seek and find in speaking out and acting against injustice. Jewish Voice for Peace lists several places to donate on their website. 

With poetry on our lips and our fists in the air,

Split This Rock

***

Poems in Solidarity With Charlottesville from The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database

NOTE: In most cases these are excerpts. To read the full poem and to learn more about the poet, please click on the link below the excerpt.


Vox Populi for the Marooned     
By Vincent Toro

We will break nothing when we leave, bind ourselves like cloth around
a fevered chest, float across plazas like a warm sponge over a sore shin,
and become a shameless shore of sin carousing, a flesh tinted mandala

of static bribing the sky with the promise that we will gather here each
day until fear is in need of hospice. And we will come bearing incense
and peach pie. And whenever the wounds of injustice are salted in our

favelas we will gather again in the squares of Tiananmen and Taksim,
of Tahrir and Trafalgar, of Bolivar and Union. Like barnacles or fluorescent
algae, we will gather… we will gather… we will gather…

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/vox-populi-for-the-marooned


YOU ARE WHO I LOVE    
By Aracelis Girmay

You protecting the river   You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick

You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose

You taking your medicine, reading the magazines

You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/you-are-who-i-love


Our Movable Mecca
By Danez Smith

    we who were born into conundrum, came into the world as the world was leaving, children of the ozone, the oppressed, the overlooked, of obtuse greed, of oil overlords, of oblong definitions of justice

    who asked for water & were given a border, a wall in the ocean, a wall in the air, a wall right down the middle of our bodies, bodies left to sun dry, bodies
told they were barely bodies, bodies emptied of blood & rights, bodies whispered into rumor

    who were hungry & were given a cell to hunger in & sometimes saw our own flesh transfigured into prisons, running in circles trying to escape ourselves

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/our-movable-mecca


Declaration of Inter-Dependence
By Richard Blanco

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor…

We’re the living who light vigil candles and the cop who didn’t shoot. We’re the inmate with his volunteer teacher diagraming sentences, the Buddhist alongside the stockbroker serving soup at a shelter. We’re the grandfather taking a selfie with his grandson and his husband, the widow’s fifty cents in the collection plate and the golfer’s ten-thousand-dollar pledge for a cure.

We hold these truths to be self-evident…

We’re them. They’re you. You’re me. We’re us: a handshake, a smile good morning on the bus, a door held open, a seat we give up on the subway. We tend restrooms or sell art, make huevos rancheros or herbed salmon, run for mayor or restock shelves, work a backhoe or write poems. We’re a poem in progress.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/declaration-of-inter-dependence


Ode To What We Make
By Kathy Engel

and praise the longed for moon
casting the night, the heaving rain,
its wet coat, praise each alphabet’s
lonely letter clamoring for light,
resisting the end of memory, the
end of touch, each cell and clot
still alive in any language,
still gorgeous, to be invented,
praise the clumsiness of this
word sharpening its animal teeth
for the love of the cub.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/ode-to-what-we-make


‘I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me’
By Minal Hajratwala

Your rage is the fulcrum of your desire, chimaerae busting out of cages, heart-sparks flying. Your rage gets shit done & it is no joke. Your rage is the luminous gold truth of sunrise, what you sit with long enough to dissolve your fear. Your rage is a checkmate to your compromise. Your rage is heat from a magnifying glass, focused, bursting into flame.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/i-am-broken-by-the-revolt


Til the Taste of Free in Our Mouths (Brown Baby
Lullaby)
By Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

      Wake baby, wake child, this lullaby will break the cage

You will taste the blood of your brothers in our milk, remembering

their glorious beauty as it warms your throat, you will

not know the cold of the concrete that swallowed them whole.

We are a swarm, a pride, a righteous and thick army

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/til-the-taste-of-free


Stand
By Ruth Forman

why so afraid to stand up?
someone will tell you
sit down?

but here is the truth
someone will always tell you
sit down

the ones we remember
kept standing

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/stand


Hold
By Gowri Koneswaran

hold hands when
they come calling,
when they threaten,
"this is necessary to
teach you a lesson" or
"this is necessary
to protect you"

hold hands when we stand still,
when we walk, when
we run
when they tell us to
surrender
when they tell us
to do anything

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/hold


The World We Want Is Us
By Alice Walker

It moves my heart to see your awakened faces;
the look of "aha!"
shining, finally, in
so many
wide open eyes.
Yes, we are the 99%
all of us
refusing to forget
each other

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/the-world-we-want-is-us


from Say Yes
By Andrea Gibson

‘cause tonight Saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that whatever song we’ve been singing we sing even more.
The world needs us right now more than it ever has before.
Pull all your strings.
Play every chord.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/from-say-yes

Split This Rock Interview with Aracelis Girmay

This conversation is one in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness. Complete information about the festival can be found on the website. Follow the 2016 Fest Interview tag to find all the previous interviews.

by Narges Shafeghati

Photo by Sheila Griffin

Aracelis Girmay is originally from Santa Ana, California. She went *to school* at Cave Canem, Acentos, NYU, Community~Word Project, and Bar 13. Girmay is the author of the poetry collections Teeth and Kingdom Animalia, and the collage-based picture book changing, changing. She has been awarded the GLCA New Writers Award and the Isabella Gardner Award (BOA Editions), and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Most recently, Girmay's poetry and essays have been published in Granta, Black Renaissance Noire, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has received grants and fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, the NEA, and the Whiting Foundation. For the past few years, Girmay has been studying texts and other materials that, through form, language(s), diction, and gesture, perform and think about place and loss of place (or displacement) and what this sometimes has to do with the sea. Her book, The Black Maria, is slated for publication by BOA in spring, 2016. Current collaborations include work with the Critical Projections collective and a translation project with writer and visual artist Rosalba Campra. Girmay is on the faculty of The School for Interdisciplinary Arts at Hampshire College and Drew University's low-residency MFA program. Before that, and for several years, Girmay taught community and youth writing workshops.  For more information, visit Girmay’s website. (Photo by Sheila Griffin)

***

Narges Shafeghati (NS): Do you remember the first poem you’ve ever written? (If yes,)What made it a poem/ Who called it a poem? Who made you write it?

Aracelis Girmay (AG): I do not remember the first poem I've ever written (I don't think). But I do remember clearly the red typewriter my Aunt Pat gave me in 7th grade. It was her typewriter at her bank job. And then it came to be mine. I loved that typewriter. The mechanism. The machine of it. The color. The clunk and work. The effort of it and the effort it required of me. I wrote several things using that typewriter but the one I remember most was the tiny little square of text about a friend's suffering in the domestic realm. Now, looking back, I think I made it so small to get some power over a sadness that felt forever and engulfing. The poem for me, then, was about smallness (that was what a poem meant to me, I suppose). That smallness helped the world and fact of it seem more navigable.

NS: What role did your parents or the closest people to you play on your path to discover your inner poet?

AG: What an immensely beautiful and powerful question. Thank you, Narges. Both my parents are wonderful storytellers. As they are talking/telling story, they are simultaneously transported into the realm of the story or history. Growing up, my brother and I were constantly asking for stories and/or listening in on the stories the adults were telling each other in the front seats of the car or around a table or at a barbecue or party. I have always loved the turns of phrases, the small details of each person's way of seeing, saying. A grandmother's gesture, the wideness of Aunt Darlene's smile as she talked about a book. There were poets around me. Everywhere. Makers of dinners and stories. Artists. Dancers. Dressers. A community of family and friends who could keep telling the same story again and again and again in different ways even though we were all there when the story took place. I love that. That way of sharing, again and again, what we all felt/saw happened... as if to say, Can you believe it? --or--Do you remember? Don't ever forget. --or--I was Here once. And you were Here. And we were Here.

NS: What made you want to be a teacher?

AG: I want to be a part of the world/community who nourishes imagination and love and kindness and bright rigor and curiosity--especially with/for young people. Teaching seemed a way to do this. Also, teaching was a way to be around people who are constantly (and vulnerably) trying, working Toward together.

NS: How do you nowadays show your love, affection, gratitude to dear ones? What is your favorite way of doing so?

AG: I love, love writing letters. Sealing the envelope. Choosing a beautiful stamp then dropping it all in the blue postal box on a corner here or there. I also love flowers--bringing flowers to someone dear. Or making butter cake with Nutella icing and berries (black, raspberry) and maybe a flower here or there on its butter cake-with -icing hair. There was a year when I was making a lot of flan, but I have moved out of that year into this new one with butter cake. I also sometimes (though rarely these last years) make collages/cards. Tangerines and lemons are also the perfect, perfect gifts--especially in snow and winter. That shock of brightness.

NS: What about strangers?

AG: Smiling. In and with my mind saying Thank You. Stopping someone to say, Oh! Talking when it is right to talk beside and with. Writing poems often. Poems that are odes to strangers or full of lessons that they helped me to understand whether or not they knew that they were teaching me to see.

NS: What is your relationship with the Middle East and Sudan? Is there personal experience or only empathy behind the poems in TEETH?

AG: I have never been to Sudan but it is near my father's country, Eritrea, and is, especially since the struggle for independence and the refugees who moved to/through Sudan from Eritrea, forever holding hands with Eritrea. The questions I am asking in these poems (questions about displacement, exile, state-sanctioned violences, and then beautiful, subversive acts of possibility and remembering) are part of a river of questions that I am asking/thinking about throughout my work and in relation to Palestine, yes, and Sudan, and Eritrea, and the United States, and Puerto Rico. It is important for me to think about the ways that all of these stories are connected even though history books have bullied me into thinking that I was wrong to connect them.

NS: What would the ideal gender (equality) education look like to you when it comes to raising your own kids? What would be self-evident to your kids and what would freedom for them look like?

AG: This question is immense and beautiful and big. I must take more time to think about what I would like to share here.

NS: Lastly, what ADVICE would you personally consider most important TO A YOUNG POET who is, especially regarding her dream to teach poetry as a liberating force and life-changing element, yet SEEKING A BALANCE BETWEEN a full dedication to serving and enabling art AND the need of self-expression and concentrating on personal artistic development.

AG: The one thing I would say to myself if a version of me were asking this question (and I suppose this is true, I do carry/have carried this question) is: how are all of these elements part of the same thread? Isn't there a way that the nurturing one's teaching is also the nurturing of one's artistic practice? And vice versa. I can only speak for myself: I am the best, most alive and asking writer when I am working in community (reading with others, writing and sharing with others, thinking through questions across/through several fields and disciplines). I feel most liberated (or close to liberated... on a kind of brink) when everyone is teaching/might teach and is learning/might learn. For me, it is not difficult to work in community but also to carve out space to work on one's own (partially because I think teaching necessitates reflection just as writing necessitates reflection/revision and so this time/this balancing is built in). Where things become tricky for me is when money is part of the equation. Figuring out how to balance the amount of money/work it takes to pay bills with the desire/impulse to work on quieter personal projects is consistently difficult. I hate that this is true. One thing I am asking is, How do I make sure to value this quiet non-paid time and really respect/carve out time to be quiet in the reflection or the experimenting with the making of work--realizing that it is absolutely antithetical to what the culture of capitalism (as my colleague N. A. often says) expects from us and how we are expected to think about valuing our sense of time.

***

Narges Shafeghati, 23, is the eldest of a Muslim Iranian couple, a designer and a poet. Born and raised in Germany, she is currently finishing her undergrad in the Expressive Arts in Social Transformation in Hamburg. Narges is a poet, a pluralist, and a dreamer. She is fluent in and in love with German, Farsi and English, learning Hebrew, and working on translating Persian and German poetry and prose. From Oct'15-Feb'16 Narges was a full-time intern with Split This Rock in DC, where she experienced her dream work environment, made lovely friends, met her dream colleagues, AND the love of her life.

Poem of the Week: Aracelis Girmay

Break

When the boys are carnivals

we gather round them in the dark room

& they make their noise while drums

ricochet against their bodies & thin air

below the white ceiling hung up like a moon

& it is California, the desert. I am driving in a car,

clapping my hands for the beautiful windmills,

one of whom is my brother, spinning,

on a hillside in the garage

with other boys he'll grow old with, throw back.

How they throw back their bodies

on the cardboard floor, then spring-to, flying

like the heads of hammers hitting strings

inside of a piano.

     Again, again.

This is how they fall & get back up. One

who was thrown out by his father. One

who carries death with him like a balloon

tied to his wrist. One whose heart will break.

One whose grandmother will forget his name.

One whose eye will close. One who stood

beside his mother's body in a green hospital. One.

Kick up against the air to touch the earth.

See him fall, then get back up.

Then get back up.

***

From The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015). Used with permission. Photo by Sheila Griffin.

***

Aracelis Girmay is the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing, and the poetry collections Teeth and Kingdom Animalia. Girmay is on the faculty of Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Drew University's low-residency MFA program. For the past few years, she has been studying texts and other materials that, through form, language(s), diction, and gesture, perform and think about place and loss of place (or displacement), and what this sometimes has to do with the sea.

*** 

Please feel free to share Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this post, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.

Sunday Kind of Love with Aracelis Girmay and David Gewanter

Sunday Kind of Love!
Sunday May 16, 2010

4-6pm

Featuring Aracelis Girmay
and David Gewanter

Busboys and Poets
14th & V St., NW
Washington, DC

Hosted by Sarah Browning and Katy Richey
Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets and Split This Rock

Open mic at each event!
Admission free, donations encouraged

For more info: www.BusboysandPoets.com
browning@splitthisrock.org

www.SplitThisRock.org
202-387-POET



Aracelis Girmay is the author of the poetry collection Teeth, for which she was named a Pan African Literary Fellow & recipient of the GLCA New Writers Award. Girmay's work has also been published in Callaloo, Ploughshares, & MiPoesias, among other journals. She teaches in Drew University's low-residency MFA program, DreamYard's Bronx Poetry Project, & will begin teaching at Hampshire College in September. Among the poets whose work is deeply teaching her are: Forugh Farrokhzad, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martín Espada, Nazim Hikmet, & Lucille Clifton.



David Gewanter is author of three books of poetry: In the Belly (1997), The Sleep of Reason (2003), and War Bird (Fall 2009) all published by the University of Chicago Press. His work appears in Threepenny Review, Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, New England Review, Fulcrum, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Tikkun, Slate.com, Harvard Review, PoetryMagazine.com, Crossroads, Boston Globe, Semicerchio (Italy), PMLA, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Witter Bynner fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writer's award, and a Hopwood award. He teaches at Georgetown University and lives in DC.

Sunday Kind of Love with Aracelis Girmay and David Gewanter

Sunday Kind of Love
Sunday May 16, 2010

4-6pm

Featuring Aracelis Girmay
and David Gewanter

Busboys and Poets
14th & V St., NW
Washington, DC

Hosted by Sarah Browning and Katy Richey
Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets and Split This Rock

Open mic at each event!
Admission free, donations encouraged

For more info: www.BusboysandPoets.com
browning@splitthisrock.org

www.SplitThisRock.org
202-387-POET


Aracelis Girmay is the author of the poetry collection Teeth, for which she was named a Pan African Literary Fellow & recipient of the GLCA New Writers Award. Girmay's work has also been published in Callaloo, Ploughshares, & MiPoesias, among other journals. She teaches in Drew University's low-residency MFA program, DreamYard's Bronx Poetry Project, & will begin teaching at Hampshire College in September. Among the poets whose work is deeply teaching her are: Forugh Farrokhzad, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martín Espada, Nazim Hikmet, & Lucille Clifton.

David Gewanter is author of three books of poetry: In the Belly (1997), The Sleep of Reason (2003), and War Bird (Fall 2009) all published by the University of Chicago Press. His work appears in Threepenny Review, Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, New England Review, Fulcrum, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Tikkun, Slate.com, Harvard Review, PoetryMagazine.com, Crossroads, Boston Globe, Semicerchio (Italy), PMLA, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Witter Bynner fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writer's award, and a Hopwood award. He teaches at Georgetown University and lives in DC.