Alberto Reyes Morgan is one of the recipients of the 2021 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. The prize recognizes 12 emerging writers each year for their debut short story published in a literary magazine, journal, or cultural website, and aims to support the launch of their careers as fiction writers. The winning writers each receive a $2,000 cash prize and will be published by Catapult in their annual anthology, Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize.

Read more about the Award at the link below.

https://pen.org/pen-dau-short-story-prize/?fbclid=IwAR0MAeaux_8htQ0wOSH3W88mb2hQnppl-FqUy_iHkwW6V5J3Ez66JyKDi0w

Poetry alum Dinah Berland was recently featured in Forward. Hear her discuss her mentee Amanda Gorman, who recently read at President Biden’s inauguration, below:

Amanda Gorman’s former mentor knows what drives her

A lot of us shed tears when Amanda Gorman recited her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the inauguration of President Joe Biden.

Dinah Berland didn’t just cry, she screamed.

“Oh my goodness, I was just thrilled,” Berland, a Jewish poet and author who has been a mentor to the young poet laureate. “I knew she would rise to the occasion, because of who she is.”

Berland started working with Gorman, who is now 22, six years ago. She has seen an already-gifted girl grow, through hard work and focused ambition, into the young woman who commanded the national spotlight — and will be in it once again on Sunday when she is scheduled to recite a poem at the Superbowl pre-game show.

They met in the spring of 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, where Gorman was reciting a poem as part of WriteGirl, a nonprofit that empowers girls through self-expression. Berland, an accomplished poet and author, had come because she wanted to serve as one of the group’s mentors.

“Amanda got up there and she was so far superior to the other kids,” Berland recalled in an interview last week. “I wanted her to know she was special.”

So Berland followed her out of the museum and found Amanda sitting alone on a bench.

“I introduced myself, and I said hoped she would take her work seriously,” Berland said.

A few weeks later, someone from WriteGirl called Berland to say the group had “the perfect young girl” for her—Amanda Gorman. She was already well on her way, having been selected as Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate in 2014, and publishing a book of poetry, “The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough” in 2015.

Gorman’s passion was clear. In a poem published in a WriteGirl anthology when she was 14 years-old, she wrote, “Poetry is your voice when you don’t have one/It is who you are when you don’t know.”

Berland, who has an MFA from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, has published prize-winning poetry, and also wrote “Hours of Devotion: Fanny Neuda’s Book of Prayers for Jewish Women” (Schocken, 2007), a verse adaptation of the first Jewish prayer book by a woman. Her poetic translations channel Neuda’s 19th-century voice through a modern sensibility.

The two women, 60 years apart, began working together at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in West Los Angeles.

“She was primarily a spoken-word poet,” Berland recalled. “Maya Angelou was her favorite. So we studied poetry on the page, how poems live on as literature.

“She’s really a genius, totally brilliant,” she added. “She wanted professional guidance from a writer.”

Sitting in the noisy café, Berland and Gorman read poets like Terrance Hayes and Yusef Komunyakaa. They read Rita Dove, the first African-American to hold the title of U.S. Poet Laureate, and Natasha Trethewey, a more recent U.S. Poet Laureate.

Berland gave Gorman assignments she herself had in graduate school, which she said Gorman aced, though she was just 16. Berland gave Gorman prompts to write from, and Gorman, to Berland’s astonishment, would be able to concentrate and write amidst the din. On her own, Gorman devoured biographies of poets.

“She wanted to understand how poets became poets,” Berland said.

Read the article in its entirety here: https://forward.com/news/463367/amanda-gormans-former-mentor-knows-what-drives-her/

  Split
 
Mother, I wish I could twin myself and tuck you in 
to your blanket cocoon. You say the cold eats at your bones, 
 
and I know, because last time I heard crumbling marrow 
roll through you like rain. Mother, there are feathers 
 
stuck in my throat. I wish for a twin with telepathic lips 
against your good ear. Let her relay that yesterday
 
a swarm of cedar waxwings picked clean your daughter’s
ligustrum of fruit. The daughter who moved to warmer climes, 
 
because you said—remember?—everything would be okay. 
Let this slightly more beautiful child help you find the perfect tilt, 
 
suspend your legs, undo gravity’s pressure. I made sure 
she knows your fleece throw should fold under your feet, 
 
that your worn pillow is to cradle your head, 
and it’s your left ear to which she should bend when she says:  
 
your far-away daughter sends love from her new, green yard. 
Her voice chimes like mine, but may sound sweeter as it swirls 
 
into your inner ear. Mother, don’t let her vibrations fool you 
if through thin cochlear fluid you hear:  
 
I am the girl who loves you best. My twin is prone to lie, 
even as she leans, her silken hair glancing your eyes. The laws 
 
are different here. From twelve hundred miles away, I duplicate. 
I splinter. I fly. Mother, I float to your ceiling, drift over
 
your body. Your body my heart once beat in, 
where as a dark cluster of cells I began furiously to split.

Charles Douthat, a 2019 poetry alum, was recently featured in the Threepenny Review. Read “Polk Street” below:

Polk Street

I don’t remember who chose the shabby tavern
on Polk Street three blocks north of Market,  
only that we landed there afternoons after another  

tedious law school class, lounging at its lacquered
mahogany bar near the square, filthy, street-facing
plate-glass window and its neon MILLERS sign.    

There was the one ancient gimpy bartender coughing
his smoker’s cough in the shadows, and an erratic
overhead flickering from bare-bulb fluorescents,      

and liquor stocks shelved before a mirror reflecting
both a second image of each bottle and our own  
two faces stenciled by the bar’s tinseled, mirrored light.   

No doubt you know a place like it.  There must be  
a thousand places like it.  But no other with my sister
on the high leather stool beside me, lighting up   

a mentholed Newport, sipping her vodka martini,
still droll and sun-blonde, fresh and wicked-clever
and cocky at twenty-eight for all her weaknesses. 

I’d complain about our dull professors.  She would
make me laugh as only she could, turning the hour
privileged and superb, reducing our current troubles

to brief stations we’d glide through effortlessly
together.  Carolyn would do good work in the years
ahead.  She would draft laws still on the books

in California, and before drink took over her life
she made the world better for people.  For many  
people, those who know her work still maintain. 

They say you can’t go back but I ask what matters
more after everything that happens.  My sister slips
a Newport from its box.  I strike a match and watch

the red glow of tobacco igniting as her cigarette
nears my half-cupped hand.  Fruitless maybe, 
yet I go back if only to save a fraction of her liveliness, 

even just the match-light’s flare in her face.  Though
doubtless she’d argue, if she could, that I also return
for last word in what became our life-long debate.

Calling for a fresh martini and swinging back my way
Carolyn cheerfully tries to persuade again that nothing,
not she nor I nor anything else can be saved.

With permission from the Threepenny Review.