What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today?
What book popped for you in 2015?
Whose words do you return to regularly?
Muriel Rukeyser in Life of Poetry, Audre Lorde’s essays, poetry of Etel Adnan, Pasolini and Philip Whalen, Gail Scott’s novels to name a few of many.
Is there an author you can’t wait to read next?
Excited to get Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words. I also want to read all the Bernadette Mayer that I haven’t read.
What are you working on now? What can VIDA fans look forward to from you next?
I’m working on what will, I think, be my sixth volume of poetry, title still unclear. It’s another poetic journal book that is kind of a style and tone mash of the other ones. Perhaps a finale. My next book is out March 15 from Fence Books and is called Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals.
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STACY SZYMASZEK is a poet, editor and arts administrator. She is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), and hart island (2015). Her book, Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals, won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books and will be published in early 2016. She’s the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She is a regular teacher for Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, and mentor for Queer Art Mentorship. Szymaszek has been the Director of the Poetry Project since 2007.