Here we are at poetry month again
Join us for Poet Pallooza II at Barnes & Noble and the grand opening of the Blue Flame Retail Store April 6
My art director decided to prank me for April Fools and presented this to me as our new logo. So, if you saw it online, that’s as far as we take April Fools. We’ll never claim that we closed our doors. We’ll never make claims that we signed a big author or sold a million books.
My mama raised me not to cry wolf and I’m not taking the chance.
Today, I’m camping out on this rainy day at the VW dealer. The car needs a 60,000 mile service, which considering it’s a 2015 isn’t so bad. I wasn’t expecting to do this service until August, but my teenager has been using my car it came a little sooner than I would have liked.
But, at this point, I have mastered the art of the mobile office. So, the 3.5 hours I spent in the dealership yielded several thousand words of my ghostwriting, mafia novel, a slightly cleaner email box, and most of the copy for this newsletter.
Poetry and other events this month
This weekend launches a fun April for us. Parisian Phoenix has a little bit of everything happening, from a school visit on Thursday to the grand opening celebration of the Blue Flame Retail Store at the Palmer Park Mall in Easton, Pa., and of course, our first official event of National Poetry Month, Poet Pallooza II at the Barnes & Noble at the Southmont Shopping Center in Bethlehem Township, Pa.
Darrell Parry will be featuring there at 3 p.m. and Parisian Phoenix will have a table to discuss with poets (or anyone really) the realities of putting books together and selling them.
Echo City Capers will be at the same Barnes & Noble the next day promoting their lively children’s picture books and their middle-grade fiction novel. They have a new picture book releasing in time for Arbor Day, April 26, The Ballad of Otto the Oak. The official launch of Otto will be at the Barnes & Noble in the Promenade Shops in Center Valley, Pa., on Saturday, April 27.
(Speaking of which, pre-orders of Otto the Oak are already underway.)
Next week is the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group The Write Stuff Conference, April 11-13, which features Jonathan Maberry as the keynote this year and one of my favorite authors, Jordan Sonnenblick, as one of the presenters.
At 3:30 p.m. on April 9, Wayne Sherrer will be on-campus at Hackettstown, N.J.,’s Centenary College for a book signing of his Black History book, Phorgotten No More.
The Echo City Capers duo will be at the Pennsylvania School Library Association Conference April 12.
I will be doing more educational visits this April, speaking with author Laurel Wenson’s publishing class at Northampton Community College on April 17 and followed by a portfolio review of the graphic design students of the same school on April 23.
Meanwhile…
Welcome McKenna Graf
In other poetry month news, we signed a new poet McKenna Graf. She called herself a “future cat lady” so she should fit in around here… one of the criteria for membership in our Parisian Phoenix club is that you either have to love cats OR be allergic to them (or if you are me, you fall in both camps and upset your doctors greatly).
On the brink of artistic insanity. McKenna is as ambitous as she is lovely and we are thrilled to have her. She self-published her first poetry chapbook and will be publishing her second manuscript, Mortals, Myths, and Maybes, with us! She also has several short films in progress on her Vimeo and is interested in the intersection between film and poetry. You can follow more of her journey on Instagram @mckennagrafwrites or visit her website at www.mckennagraf.com.
While still speaking of poetry, we designed our display at the Blue Flame Retail Shop to highlight our poets.
And since McKenna mentioned cats, Eva Parry and I found this guy in our garage a few days ago and are in the process of cleaning him up and taking him to be scanned for a microchip. He’s not very sure about our lifestyle, with so many cats and a dog and some loud and/or clumsy people in our household. He definitely likes the cuisine— having dined on wet food, kibble, tuna juice and bits of chicken and ham.
As always—
Angel