My poems can make a difference!

Poet Bio: Raphael Dagold's first book, Bastard Heart, was published in 2014 by Silverfish Review Press, and was a finalist for the Utah Book Award in Poetry. Over the past year and a half, his new poetry manuscript, Self Storage, has been a finalist or semifinalist in eight competitions, including the University of Wisconsin Press Brittingham & Pollak Prizes, the Trio House Press Louise Bogan Award, and the University of Georgia Press Georgia Prize. Dagold's poems, essays, and photographs have won numerous awards, and have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Diode, The Asheville Poetry Review, The American Literary Review, The Antioch Review, and The North American Review. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. Currently, he lives in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where he is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Creative Writing at the American University of Central Asia. He spent most of this summer at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Jentel Foundation working on poems and a book of essays, but August returns him to Bishkek.

Author Statement: During the month of August—the start of my second year living and teaching in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan—my goal is to write poems that vividly engage this multilayered city. Kyrgyzstan is a post-Soviet space that borders China and is open—politically, economically, culturally—to the West, to Russia, and to regions south and east, echoing its historical position on the Silk Road. I'm an American living in Bishkek, teaching Western-style liberal arts courses, in English, to (mostly) Central Asian students, most of whose first language is Russian. I am going to try to write poems that start from the ground where I walk each day and that somehow listen to the varied histories around me and that I am also a part of. I don't yet know what this will look like, or how well I'll succeed.

Your support gives me vital inspiration as I write for thirty days this month.

Tupelo Press provides the canvas, I bring my words, accompanied by other fine poets, writing thirty poems in thirty days, all ours to edit and submit as we wish. 30/30 poems have been taken by over 90 journals and featured in over 40 published chapbooks, all so Tupelo Press can keep publishing exquisite and diverse voices that might never be heard otherwise.

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