There is something special about a journal that takes as much care with its physical production as with the literature and art within it. It's an honor and thrill to be in this issue of Northwest Review, the last under the editorship of Natalie Staples and S. Tremaine Nelson. Steve Nelson's kind notes on rejections from the Paris Review years ago were massively important to my confidence as a writer, and when I heard he had left that journal to revive Northwest Review I got a submission together posthaste. I'm so happy this poem—a dear one to me, which marks the moment in my book To Leave for Our Own Country that my wife's pregnancy is revealed—has found such a wonderful second home in these pages.
As followers of my social media accounts will know by now, this has been an eventful fall for my publication life!
My primary work on The Nature-Study Idea and Related Writings for The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library (Cornell University Press) is finally complete, and the manuscript has been sent off to copyeditors. If all goes well, that should appear in the fall of 2023, and I will share a link on the website as soon as I have one for preorders. I have meanwhile been running a very successful fundraising effort to make the book more affordable and accessible to working teachers, for whom the book carries great instructional and inspirational potential, and we are now within reach of offering the book in a fully open-access edition! If you are interested in supporting leading-edge resources for teachers of outdoor learning (the book features new work by David W. Orr, Dilafruz R. Williams, and myself, as well as Bailey's writings on nature-study), I hope you'll consider donating and sharing the campaign here!
And then, just five months or so after the new Bailey edition drops, April 2024 will see the publication of my debut poetry collection, To Leave for Our Own Country, by Black Lawrence Press! I'm overjoyed that the manuscript has found such a caring and dynamic literary home; I've already been incredibly impressed by the press's commitment to its authors. Again, I look forward to sharing ordering information once preorders are available.
And I've been back in the game of journal submissions, following a hiatus of a couple years. I now have four different poems forthcoming in journals and magazines: Northwest Review, The Christian Century, Notre Dame Review, and Dunes Review. I can't wait to share these new poems when they are out in the world in the coming months!
Until then,
John
I am once again returning to this site for updates, as I seem to do in July.
The biggest updates are life updates, and the best of them all is that Monique and I welcomed our baby daughter into the world in March of this year. The joy and light she brings us each day is immeasurable. Here we are with her near Cape May, New Jersey earlier this month.
I completed the term of my Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship in English at New York University in the spring, and next month I will be embarking on a new chapter as a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at The Climate Museum in New York City. I couldn't be more excited to join the folks at the museum as they enter an exciting period of growth and work toward the establishment of a permanent location in the city!
Life has continued in this strange and difficult time, even if I haven't been keeping this site quite up to date. Below is a list of poems of mine that have appeared since I last posted, which was about my pandemic-topical poem in April 2020. These have appeared on the pages and websites of Atlanta Review, The Citron Review, Roanoke Review, and Commonweal Magazine. I'm very happy as well to share that my little poem "Dianthus Clavelina, Sprout!," on the list below, was nominated by The Citron Review for a Best of the Net award last year, which was a wonderful honor. And then a literary essay in The Antioch Review and a scholarly article in an edited anthology—a lot has happened in the past year!
A very fresh poem of mine, reflecting on the uncanny weirdness of life under relative quarantine in New York City, is now available over at Writers Resist in their "Viral Resistance Issue"—check it out here.
Auto shops still rollicking with laughter,
a boy walks by, dribbles his ball alone. (full poem)
I was fortunate to place several poems and a literary essay in various literary journals in the last several months of 2019, plus another poem that just went live this month and will be in print in February 2020, and one of my favorites, "Blueshift," which appeared in Cold Mountain Review early last summer but which I never got around to announcing on this site (it's been a hectic academic-job-application season):
Here's a little more information about each of these pieces:
With the launch this week of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings in Ithaca, New York, I wanted to highlight a few of my upcoming presentations, with the hopes that friends along the way will stop by each of them to say hello!
I was so thrilled to receive my copy recently of Free State Review's newest issue, including my "Storm's Breath," a Lake Michigan poem! Thank you, thank you, thank you to Barrett Warner for bringing this beautiful collective lyrical beast into the world!
and every time the waves hiss back
a million tiny worms
peek out of holes to breathe
and then slip back. Their world,
water. And breath. And water
again. (read more below)
It's my pleasure to announce that I have signed a contract with Cornell University Press to serve as general editor of a forthcoming series of books by and about the great Progressive-Era horticulturist, philosopher, educator, poet, administrator, and naturist Liberty Hyde Bailey!
The series will feature new editions of Bailey's works that have long been out of print, including fresh editorial and other supplementary material, as well as works never before published, and it will also feature new secondary literature about Bailey's life and legacy and an online database that will begin to collect electronic editions of his writings and serve as a central hub for Baileyana online. Potential titles for the print series include The Nature-Study Idea, Onamanni, The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil, a collection of new essays assessing Bailey's impact on twentieth-century environmental thought and his relevance today, The Outlook to Nature, The Garden Lover, and many more.
I'm thrilled that Cornell University Press has agreed to embark on this long-term project with me as we seek to reintroduce Bailey's work to a twenty-first-century readership. We are in the midst of finalizing an advisory board of Bailey scholars to help guide the evolution of the series, and so far Scott J. Peters, Daniel Wayne Rinn, and Jane L. Taylor have all agreed to join the team. Work on the series is slated to begin in the summer of 2020 (just after I defend my dissertation!), but, in the meantime, there's no need to wait—you'll have plenty of time to enjoy the anthology of Bailey's garden writings that John Stempien and I have coedited, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings, which is available for preorder now and should be hitting the shelves of your local bookstore in September.
~
Image: adapted from George Silk, "Liberty Hyde Bailey and his books," Images from Cornell's Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Library, Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections, c2005, https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:545630.
At the end of this month, on May 31 at 10:30 AM in Room 107-D of the DeVos Center at Grand Valley State University, I will be participating in a roundtable discussion at the Fifth Annual Midwestern History Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The panel's topic is "Placing Literary Agrarianism in the Twentieth-Century Midwest," and it will be composed of contributors to a new collection of essays, forthcoming from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, titled Mapping Midwestern Minds: Essays on the Intellectual History of the American Midwest.