Haiku Society: An Interview with Ben Gaa
December Magazine
“People look to poets and artists to a certain degree in the West to see their vision. But with haiku, if I’m doing my job, you don’t see me.”
The Many Gigs of Guitar Star Dave Black
St. Louis Magazine
“No matter what show he’s at, he wants to play his best. He puts his head down and starts shaking—he’s in the Dave Black zone.”
Iconographer Kelly Latimore Sees God in Plain Sight
The Christian Century
“People asked, ‘Is it George Floyd or Jesus?’ My answer was yes.”
December Magazine
Marvin Bell was a brilliant poet and teacher who made me laugh. He died on Dec. 14 at the age of 83. I had the honor of interviewing him for December, where he served as an advisory editor.
Jane Ellen Ibur, Poet Laureate of St. Louis, Wants Others at the Mic
St. Louis Poetry Center
“Poetry saved my life, but I couldn’t keep it to myself. It gave me this vision of seeing other people who had a dark passenger, you know, and I wanted to give them the gift of poetry. I’m like a poetry missionary.”
Why St. Louis career servers make the hospitality industry a home
Sauce
Ken Bollwerk, a 68-year-old man with a twinkle in his eye, has made a living laying napkins on the laps of the rich and famous, plating fettuccine with duck confit from a tableside cart and pampering guests. He’s worked for 44 years at Tony’s, the iconic St. Louis restaurant just a few hundred yards from the gleaming Gateway Arch.
A Conversation with Globe-Trotting Poet-Educator Naomi Shihab Nye
St. Louis Poetry Center
Whether she’s in Syria, France, India, or Texas, she helps children discover poetry as an imaginative means to connect to themselves and others, sometimes across clashing cultures. Poetry, she has said, is a “slower form of empathy.”
An Interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval
December
It’s not only Kercheval’s words that have spread across the literary world, but also her literary DNA. She is a mother of writers, or una madre de escritores, as she might say in Spanish. She writes poems in that language, too.
Walgreens’ New Level of Hypocrisy
The Progressive
As it continues to sell cigarettes, the pharmacy chain is rolling out a new cosmetics program for cancer patients.
‘Activate’ citizens to claim human rights, and governments to ensure them, say Cristosal leaders
Episcopal News Service
A human rights group in El Salvador founded by Episcopal clergy is using the courts to force the government there to live up to its responsibility to protect hundreds of thousands of citizens internally displaced by rampant violence, criminal and otherwise.
How Voter Suppression Imperils the Midterms
The Progressive
Blue wavers may find it harder to cast a ballot this fall, due to a counter-wave of policies meant to suppress the Democratic-leaning votes of the poor, the young, and minorities
On the Corner of Happy and Hypocritical
The Progressive
Why is the nation’s largest drugstore chain still selling cigarettes?
Ready to Join Organized Marijuana Medicine?
Medscape Medical News
There's a professional society for seemingly every kind of medical specialist, even cannabis clinicians. Or medical marijuana physicians. Or pot doctors, in street parlance.
Former Prosecutor Profiles the Criminal Physician
Medscape Medical News
Gejaa Gobena, who once directed a healthcare fraud unit at the Department of Justice, knows how and why a tiny minority of physicians are breaking bad.
Modesty as a Poetic Virtue: An Interview with Devin Johnston
St. Louis Poetry Center
“Part of what I want from the poet is not so much the presence of the poet and their style and their sensibility,” says Devin Johnston. “Sometimes I want to see through that to something else—the world, or the language.”
Washington, the alumni magazine of Washington University in St. Louis
An obituary of the poet Howard Nemerov: When on foot, not blinded by road or destination, sight can become vision: “Four lonesome joggers slowly fleeing death.”
Washington, the alumni magazine of Washington University in St. Louis
A profile of the poet Donald Finkel: “What a writer does,” says Finkel, “is wait for invisible forces to lift him and move him, and to try, with a certain amount of ingenuity, to reach the finish line.”