Author: Scott LaClaire

Night Piece

By Judith Kitchen
From the Fall 2011 Issue

 

Sometimes the things dreamers do seem incomprehensible to others, and the world wonders why dreamers do not see the way others do.

—Queen Marie of Romania, at the dedication of the unfinished Maryhill Museum of Art, 1926

 

Eighty-eight …

Judith Kitchen passed away on 6 November 2014, just days after completing work on the essay-review in Spring 2015 Georgia Review. The contributor’s note she supplied read as follows: “Judith Kitchen has three new forthcoming essays—in the Harvard Review, Great River Review, and River Teeth. Her most recent book, The Circus Train, was the lead publication in a new venture—Ovenbird Books, at ovenbirdbooks.org.” To that we respectfully add this brief overview of her writing and teaching career: Kitchen began as a poet, publishing the volume Perennials as the winner of the 1985 Anhinga Press Poetry Prize. She then shifted to prose writing of several sorts, with emphases on essays and reviews. Her four essay volumes are Only the Dance: Essays on Time and Memory (University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Distance and Direction (Graywolf Press, 2002); Half in Shade: Family, Photographs, and Fate (Coffee House Press, 2012); and The Circus Train (Ovenbird Books, 2013)—which appeared first, almost in its entirety, in the Summer 2013 issue of The Georgia Review. In 1998 Kitchen published a critical study, Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford (University of Oregon Press), and in 2002 a novel, The House on Eccles Road (Graywolf Press). She also conceived and edited three important collections of brief nonfiction pieces, all published by W. W. Norton: In Short (1996), In Brief (1999), and Short Takes (2005)—the first two coedited by Mary Paumier Jones. Kitchen also founded State Street Press in the early 1980s, bringing out over the next twenty years seventy-six poetry chapbooks, two pamphlets, five full-length poetry volumes, two collections of translations, and a poetry anthology—the State Street Reader. After teaching for many years at SUNY-Brockport—not all that far from her birthplace of Painted Post, NY—Judith retired and moved with her husband Stan Sanvel Rubin to Port Townsend, WA, from which they founded and co-directed for a decade the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. The collection What Persists
Selected Essays on Poetry from The Georgia Review, 1988–2014 was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2015.

The Art of Benny Andrews: A 1975 Interview with Phil and Linda R. Williams

By Phil Williams Linda R. Williams

The excerpts below are taken from an interview that first appeared in the literary magazine Ataraxia 4, edited by Phil Williams and Linda R. Williams, and based in Madison, Georgia, near where Benny was born and reared. When the interview …

Danse Macabre: Talking with Connie Imboden

By Susan Ludvigson
4-14-09-462 (2009), 16" x 17.5," giclee print. By Connie Imboden.

For most of her career Connie Imboden, our Summer 2010 featured artist, has aimed her camera at a single subject—the nude body in water—capturing the human figure in transmutations beautiful and grotesque. Poet Susan Ludvigson, long intrigued and inspired by …

Susan Ludvigson, Professor Emerita at Winthrop University, was the 2014 winner of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points magazine. She has published eight collections of poems with LSU Press, including Escaping the House of Certainty (2006). The first line of “Dead,” appearing here, is the title of her next collection. Most recently, her poems can be found in the Yale Review and the Southern Review.

Riots and Outrages

By Kara Walker
From the Spring 2010 Issue

Kara Walker’s work emphatically entered the conversation about art and race in 1994 when her mural entitled “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart” debuted …

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds degrees from the Atlanta College of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her public honors include a MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award (1997), the Deutsche Bank Prize (2004), and the Larry Aldrich Award (2007), and in 2007 she was listed among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. Walker’s work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musée d’Art Moderne la Ville de Paris.

Trespassing in Eden

By Terry Rowlett
From the Spring 2009 Issue

In Terry Rowlett’s “Breaking Ground,” a pair of earthy do-it-yourselfers stake a claim to their own little patch of the promised land; seven pages later, the artist’s “American in Paradise” pauses in his grand tour across a pastoral Old World …

 

Rowlett, born and reared in Arkansas’ Ozark country, earned his MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Georgia in 1995 and remained in Athens until 2003, when he embarked on a four-year sojourn that took him to live, paint, ponder, and teach in Nova Scotia, Brooklyn, the Hudson River Valley, Nashville, and Cortona, Italy. In 2007 he returned to Athens, where he lives and works in an eco-community outside of town.