NBPF News!

Exciting News for Poetry Lovers!

My poem, “A Phoenix Facing Extinction”, has been accepted by the National Beat Poetry Foundation for their anthology, New Generation Beats Anthology.

I’m not sure how many of you are aware of my longstanding passion for the Beat era; when I was fifteen, my mentor handed me On the Road (Jack Kerouac, 1957) and told me to read it with “an open mind”. I fell in love with Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness style and became fascinated by the culture and world he inhabited. I was endlessly insatiable in my desire to learn more about this generation. For three years, I wrote stream-of-conscious novels like Kerouac, poems styled after Ginsberg, essays like diPrima, and inhaled collections by authors of this era.

My friends and I sat around past curfew, smoking cigarettes and drinking too much coffee at diners, engaged in animated discussions about Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky. We thought we were intellectuals. I began carrying a tape recorder around with me so when we smoked pot, I could record our deep pondering to transcribe later, complete with awkward giggles, guitar strumming, and silent kissing as Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac hummed in the background.

We weren’t Beat authors; I was hardly an author at all, writing about the disgust I felt toward the education system and reality television and popular music. I was a pariah, but I had my writing, my books, and the few friends who would stay up past one a.m. and talk with me passionately about love and literature.

This is just a long-winded way of saying I’m so honored that my poem will be featured in this collection, and I will be offering exclusive autographed copies of the anthology with a personalized note.

Please let me know if you’re interested so I can secure you a copy!