by Allison Peters
July 27, 2015

The weekend May sprung into June, I attended the 2015 Bear River Writers’ Conference at Camp Michigania up on Walloon Lake (where Ernest Hemingway used to spend his summers as a kid), 250 miles north of Ann Arbor, a little south of Petoskey. Sponsored by the University of Michigan Department of English, Bear River is rich with writing workshops, readings, panels (often related to publishing), and craft talks. Directed by University of Michigan faculty member and poet Keith Taylor, the annual conference—now in its fifteenth year—is regularly attended by some of the University’s most prestigious creative writing faculty as well […]
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by Phillip Witteveen
February 20, 2015

Philip Levine passed away over the weekend, on Saturday the 14th. His poetry was recognized with two National Book Awards, a Pulitzer, and with an appointment as a U.S. poet laureate. Levine was one of the first (and most prominent) poets to really put his hometown, Detroit, into verse. He found a plainspoken language to mourn with, to give pause, to join rafters in his native mise en scène—a language to tell stories of people just getting off the graveyard shift. He started writing poetry when he was only thirteen. In Levine’s work, there was always a way of recognizing aspects of the everyday as poetry; in […]
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