I'm Participating in a 30-Day Poetry Fundraising-Writing Challenge!

Hi, I am Jennifer K Dick, an American author who teaches and organizes readings and events for authors in France (full bio & book credits below). I love to fish, to journal, to travel, to paint badly, and to always remember that art is full of risk and, sometimes, reward. This end-of-summer 2021, though the month of August, I will be writing a poem a day AND I will risk sharing the drafts with you as soon as they appear. This is my contribution to the month-long challenge of the 30/30 project, where poets volunteer to write in order to raise money for Tupelo Press, for their poets and books of the future. Please help me to do this.

My goal is $500. Or 425 Euros. Or 365 British pounds. Or 55,000 Japanese Yen. Whatever currency you use, as the 30/30 June poet, Kai Coggin, calculated, the amount is only $16.66666 per day, for 30 days which seems like a very do-able goal—with your help!

Why am I writing for this? Because I believe in small, nonprofit presses--those that have published works by authors I admire, including works by friends I have met in this vast community of poets and writers working internationally today--those making poetry a community about language, experimentation, and creativity. My month for the 30/30 Tupelo Press fundraiser will be like running a mini poetry marathon. As they say "Your support gives me vital inspiration as I write for thirty days this month." But more importantly, your support will help Tupelo, its staff, and its founder Jeffrey Levine keep publishing excellent books, chapbooks, and financing internships and grants for young and experienced authors and future publishers. I want to support their efforts in this fun, creative way--and I hope you can support me and them by donating just a “cuppa joe” amount (consider it trading your coffee for a poem?) Or sign up for a Tupelo books’ annual subscription to help them while you also spur on this 3x30 syllable tercets-a-day project I am going to try to keep up.

Tupelo Press provides the place; I bring my words for thirty poems in thirty days. 30/30 poems have been taken by over 90 journals and featured in over 40 published chapbooks--which is cool and exciting--but mostly, I'm doing this so Tupelo Press can keep publishing exquisite and diverse voices that might never be heard otherwise.

Every dollar can say that poetry DOES matter in this world, a world that, alas, often values monetary reward more than any other. It's hard to keep presses alive--so thank you for helping Tupelo press place more poems in gorgeous books. Your support lets me know I'm writing and someone is reading & valuing poetry in this difficult time. I hope you can help me to help this distinguished press. Give today! THANK YOU!!!

Bio:
Jennifer K Dick is the author of Lilith: A Novel in FragmentsLilith: A Novel in Fragments (Corrupt Press, 2019), Circuits (Corrupt Press, 2013) and FluorescenceFluorescence (UofGA, 2004) as well as 6 chap/artbooks. Her next full length book, mixing writing in 3 languages, That Which I Touch Has No Name, is forthcoming from Eyewear in London this fall. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in over 50 literary magazines. She has worked as a literary editor and reader for Versal Magazine and book press (Amsterdam), Upstairs at Duroc (Paris), The Colorado Review (USA) and others. She has taught Creative Writing Workshops for WICE, the Paris Writers Workshop, Kent University’s Paris in The Arts MA program and a workshop for Strasbourg Write a Story, whose contest she judged this spring. She has also guest taught at Naropa & LIU Brooklyn’s MFA programs. She currently directs the English Dept and teaches Writing, Literature and Civilization at the Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse, where her students wrote chapbooks of poems based on a wide variety of meditation-based constraints this year. Jennifer also founded in 2005 and continues to curate the Ivy Writers Paris bilingual experimental poetry reading series, which is proud to have featured many Tupelo Press authors. She is also the co-organizer with Sandrine Wymann of “Écrire L’Art”, a series of residencies for French authors at the Kunsthalle-Mulhouse Centre d’Art Contemporain, for whom she did a series of 4 radio workshops “Générateur de textes” in April 2021, available at: http://kunsthallemulhouse.com/evenement/programme-radiophonique-pnode/