Monday, January 19, 2009

What is Wendy Mnookin reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Wendy Mnookin, author of four poetry collections, The Moon Makes Its Own Plea, What He Took and To Get Here, all from BOA Editions, and Guenever Speaks, a collection of persona poems. She has recent poems in the Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner and Salamander.

Mnookin has won a Book Award from the New England Poetry Club and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She graduated from Radcliffe College and the Vermont College MFA Program. She teaches poetry at Emerson College and at Grub Street, a non-profit writing center in Boston.

One paragraph from her entry:
I recently went back to David Wojahn's Strange Good Fortune: Essays on Contemporary Poetry. I find I read more carefully the second time through, or maybe it's that different aspects of the discussion interest me, but in any case it feels like a new read. This time around I was especially fascinated with the essay on W.D. Snodgrass--I hadn't remembered that at the beginning of his career Snodgrass wrote under as the pseudonym "Gardons" as well as under his own name. Which sent me to Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems, where I could compare the two bodies of work. I recommend reading the selection from Heart's Needle, written as Snodgrass, and the selection from Remains, where Gardons speaks--and speaks more freely.[read on]
Visit Wendy Mnookin's website and check out Garrison Keillor reading one of her poems.

Writers Read: Wendy Mnookin.

--Marshal Zeringue