We Were the Ones (interview w/ Denise Duhamel pt. 1)

The queens ask Denise Duhamel's superhero poet origin story in Part One of their interview.

Buy Denise's books at Loyalty Bookstore, a DC-area Black-owned bookstore.  

Denise Duhamel was a sociology major in undergrad. Her most recent books of poetry are Second Story; Scald; and Blowout, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four poetry collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New). Her collaboration with Julie Marie Wade, The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, was published by Noctuary Press in 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She served as the guest editor is for The Best American Poetry 2013.

Dangerous Diane is also known as DANGEROUS DIANE SPODAREK. Her website is: http://dangerousdiane.blogspot.com. She also has an MFA, from Eastern Michigan in video & performance.

Bob Flanagan and David Trinidad published A TASTE OF HONE with Cold Calm Press, 1990.

If you don't know what a gay bear is, think: dad bod-burly, hirsute, lumberjack vibes, though of course there are lots of different kind of bears, including femme bears, polar bears, and younger bears, called cubs. If you want to know more about gay taxonomy, visit my Instagram.


You can listen to the pronunciation of Orchises Press here.

Click here to read more about Bill Knott, and here to see a poem of his set to video and music (~1 min).


Click here to read more about Michael Burkard.

Click here to read Lyn Lifshin's poem "The Fathers." You can see her give a reading here (~2 min).

Read more about Tom Lux. 

More about Jean Valentine can be found here.

 
Jayne Anne Phillips's Sweethearts (illustrated by Yvonne Jacquette) can be found online and bought for like $120. You can see Phillips read with Amy Hempel for The Strand here (~60 min).

Over the last 40 years, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe has served as a home for groundbreaking works of poetry, music, theater and visual arts. A multicultural and multi-arts institution, the Cafe gives voice to a diverse group of rising poets, actors, filmmakers and musicians. Visit them online at https://www.nuyorican.org