Hello Again

My hiatus was good.

I peeked in at the blogs—as usual, a ton of great reading---and most interesting to me were the discussions of APA poets & poetics, the Best American Poetry chatter, and the very interesting podcast, Addicted to Race, on which Ji-in and Jae Ran gave interesting talks on transracial adoption. I was also pleasantly surprised to read the nice things Lorna Dee Cervantes said about me (in her September 23 entry). I also appreciate the nice comments people backchanneled me. I didn’t realize how many people read my blog, and I surely didn’t realize in the past year and a half of blogging (albeit sporadically) I have made some good friends here. There has been so much going on, I don’t even know where to begin. So, I’ll just dive in. I should also say that my future blog entries may be somewhat disjointed like this one, but I’ve come to the realization that I write enough heavily revised and edited things, and that this blog has the right to be a bit more free-wheeling and loose.

I am enjoying my critical thinking students. We recently wrote on the Rogerian model of argumentation, explored Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions, and are now forming arguments on certain aspects of media or technology. Next, we are analyzing photographs that have received the Pulitzer Prize.

I have some poems being published soon, and my side blog generated some interesting ideas for poems. One of them, “Slowness,” will be published, in a slightly different form, in OCHO #7. I also have work forthcoming in the Outside Voices 2008 Anthology, two poems (“Raison D’etre” and Three Dreams of Korea: Notes on Adoption”) forthcoming in Many Mountains Moving (this fall) and one poem (“A Thousand Saxophones”) in an anthology called Hurricane Blues: Poems About Katrina and Rita, forthcoming this fall from Southeast Missouri State University Press. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to hurricane relief. Contributors include Mark Jarman, Bob Hicok, Linda Pastan, Maureen Seaton, and many other fine poets.

I have also been working hard on a textbook I am co-writing with two colleagues (we have signed a contract with Prentice Hall—the final draft is due September 2007), and I am still trying to decide on writers to ask for blurbs for my first book of poems.

I bought my copy of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and it’s very impressive—some of the leading essayists/voices on transracial adoption collected in one anthology. Bryan Thao Worra has an awesome poem in it—the only poem in the book as far as I can tell (except for the great ones interspersed throughout Sun Yun Shin’s essay).

I discovered that there are readers of this blog from all over the world, in places I would not have expected. So, whether you’re in California, Texas, New York, Latin America, Asia, or Europe—thank you for reading.

Above all, I am pleased to report:

The most beautiful moments have been those

frequent occasions when our daughter's smile blooms.

I am telling you.

She is amazing.