summer songs: weekly

prompt

Ready for a challenge? Catch up on your writing with exclusive prompts by Diane Seuss.

Our third writing prompt is inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the sonnet ballad.”

“Sonnets from the Cherokee (I)”
Ruth Muskrat Bronson

“American Sonnet (95)”
Wanda Coleman

“Incantation of the First Order”
Rita Dove

“Little Matrons”
Su Hwang

“Love Note: Surely”
Ashley M. Jones

“The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”
Edna St. Vincent Millay

“15¢ Futures”
Marilyn Nelson

“To The Sonnet”
Ameen Rihani

“The Host of the Air”
W. B. Yeats

from the archive

Former Chancellor John Ashbery at Villa Madama, Rome, 1963
(Photo credit: F. Sacco)

essay on brooks

Brooks is a consummate portraitist …

Read an essay by Elizabeth Alexander on Gwendolyn Brooks, originally published in  The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (Library of America, 2005).

brooks’s craft

Part of the genius of Brooks’s work is her commitment to a certain democracy of morality.

“Gwendolyn Over Everything: Specificity, Humanity, and Class in ‘Beverly Hills, Chicago’”

An essay by Nate Marshall on one of Brooks’s poems.

pick of the week

On Thursday, July 25, celebrate Poetry Flash’s fifty+ anniversary with an exciting poetry reading featuring Academy Chancellor Dorianne Laux and 2022 Poet Laureate Fellow Lynne Thompson. Free and open to the public, 7 p.m. PDT, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA.

the glimpse

Camille Rankine and Rachel McKibbens on the role of violence in poetry in the latest episode of The Glimpse, produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation.

literary seminars

Explore Rumi’s views on divine love, heartache, ecstasy, and liberation with Haleh Liza Gafori.

Three sessions: August 6, 13, & 20
2:30–3:45 p.m. EDT 
Live over Zoom with recordings available

2025 Ambroggio Prize: $1,000 publication prize given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. Giannina Braschi will judge. Read the full guidelines and apply by September 15.

2025 Academy of American Poets First Book Award: Winner receives $5,000, publication by Graywolf Press, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center. Former Chancellor Alberto Ríos will judge. Apply here by September 1.