Lynne Thompson won the 2007 Perugia Press Book Prize for her first full-length collection of poems, Beg No Pardon. Beg No Pardonwas also awarded the 2008 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a frequent reader, both locally and nationally, Thompson is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, We Arrive By Accumulation andThrough A […]
“You think you know who you are; you do not. You think everything’s great in your gravy train life, your feet up on the taboret, sipping fingers of Pernod and blowing smoky O’s of Gauloise like you were born to it. You were not. You were born at County Gen., the random upshot of a […]
I saw one of the grandmothers only once in a photograph. Short and sturdy she was, a black black Carib with a forehead wide as the sea that kisses Port Elizabeth and a nose broad as the nostrum of Admiralty Bay. Breathing deeply, her breath was fume of coconut and allspice, mango and frangipani, black […]
As it happens, I have never tired of blackness—its Marcus Garvey, Raisin in the Sun, Tuskeegee airmen. Its Strivers Row and liver lips, its Dred Scott, Freedman’s Bureau, Scott Joplin. Some say black is swarthy, gloomy, evil, fiendish, but we all spring from the tribes— Ashanti, Bobo, Fulani, Wolof—their cowrie shells and krobo beads sewn […]
you begin with a sound wrapped around a syllable – Quincy Troupe Woncha take me Bobby J? Woncha take me up the trail outta New Orleans, past Natchez, past Vicksburg, all the way to Rollin’ Fork? You and me gonna beat the boll weevil, gonna beat the bent back heat all the way to Duncan, […]
Nothing beat her break her down or reek so the way she do nothing got her unzipped mind her flypaper memory she a riverbed will be for a dog’s millennium she gone lost to her un-borns she pale smoke shadow in the distance she a train whistle’s whistle this unworshipped this woman she come like […]
Lynne Thompson talks about determining the form a poem will take.
Lynne Thompson offers some advice for young writers.