What a great event — the 2nd annual B.I.O. conference in DC last Saturday! Thanks to Charles Shields for introducing me to the organization and to him, James McGrath Morris, Barbara Burkhardt, and many others for putting together such a bang-up event. Only a couple hundred attendees, so it felt both intimate and professional. Lively reception Friday …
Click here for quick and easy voting.* I’m honored that Bible Babel is in the company of excellent nonfiction books short-listed for the Library of Virginia’s 14th annual “People’s Choice” literary award. Thank you for following the link to cast your ballot. Please tell your friends and family, too! Each year the Library of Virginia recognizes authors from the state …
“Did you know,” a bright-eyed young woman breathlessly exclaimed to me, “that when King James wrote the Bible, he didn’t actually put everything in?!” I was riding the DC Metro a few weeks ago when she sat down beside me with this information. Since people don’t normally talk on the train (unless it’s a first …
Had a great time at Chop Suey Tuey bookstore in Richmond’s Carytown yesterday for Bible Babel‘s paperback debut. In the midst of the excitement of VCU’s big basketball game (on to the Final Four! wow) and the ever-amazing French Film Festival at the historic Byrd Theater, just across the street from Chop Suey Tuey, we filled the …
Bible Babel has been nominated for the 14th Annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards! I am honored even to be considered in the company of such Old Dominion authors as Carrie Brown, Richard Bausch, Edward P. Jones, Helon Habila, Deborah Eisenberg, Wesley Hogan, Donald McCaig, Scott Nelson, Melvin Ely, James I. Robertson Jr., Charles Wright, …
Stephen Dunn, poet extraordinaire. Among my favorites, a riff on the Leviticus scapegoat. It’s a prose poem in which God sympathizes with the goat and calls this method of atonement yet another human sin. I’d love to write it out for you here but haven’t asked permission. Do check it out yourself (I bought What Goes On, …
When Republicans opened the 112th Congress with a reading of the Constitution, they faced a challenge that threatened to undermine the whole purpose of the reading, to demonstrate adherence to the original document. The trouble, you see, is that the times they’ve gone a-changing… For one thing, blacks actually count today not as three-fifths of a person …
Flexibility in What Is Fixed — Constitution and the Bible Read More »
Now that I’m again safely ensconsed in my office and seated at my desk, the golden retriever’s work of exuberant greeting and following from room to room is done. So he’s sleeping soundly on the floor behind me. The pound hound, a guy who prefers the outdoors even though (short-haired and prone to shivering) he has to wear …
Looking forward to the AWP Conf! I met keynote speaker Jhumpa Lahiri over beers at BU before she won the Pulitzer and before I, well, nevermind. SHould be a good conference. Check it out, and please say hi, if you’ll be there, too!
A small clay object with scratches decipherable by only a few people in the world can nevertheless still move nations. Sometimes called “the first charter of human rights,” this text inscribed on a cylinder of clay comes from Cyrus II, founder of the Persian Empire and called “messiah” by the biblical prophet Isaiah. It dates back to the …
