8TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: WEEK 1:: INTRODUCTION BY MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI, AUTHOR OF THE FORTHCOMING CHAPBOOK DON’T BE SCARED
Welcome to the OS’s 8th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by five incredible curators, who are also our 2019 Chapbook Poets — to learn more about this year’s amazing curators and their forthcoming chapbooks, please click here! You can also navigate to the series archive, of over 200 entries, here! This week’s curator is Magdalena Zurawski, author of the forthcoming chapbook Don’t Be Scared.
My OS chapbook, Don’t Be Scared, is a long meditation on teaching, on what it means to stand in a college classroom in America today and think about poetry with an excited group of young adults. It’s about the complications and beauty of that space, a space that in many ways feels central to my identity. Given the focus of the piece, I thought it especially apt to select seven poets and writers who have been (well, two still are) undergraduate students at the University of Georgia, where I teach creative writing. These poets as young students announced themselves as writers to me, and, as you can see in their essays and bios, already move in a larger world of American poetry.
As a poet, my most intense and regular exchanges on and around poetry have been with my students. My undergraduate students in particular, because of my frequent contact with them, have helped me think about the value of poetry in a world that demands to be understood in dollars and cents. As I witness their commitment to poetry amid all the pressures and demands from a world that is “too much with us,” I’m grateful to them for helping me put my own doubts aside.
Don’t Be Scared is a poem/essay generated from my experiences in the classroom. It attempts to implicate the classroom itself in a longer narrative of modernity and democratic struggle and in that sense it deploys my academic ‘upbringing’ for political ends.
Litmus Press published my poetry collection, Companion Animal, in April of 2015. My novel, The Bruise, was published in 2008 by FC2. A poetry collection, The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom will be out from Wave Books in spring 2019. I am an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.
