Are you ready to up your writing game and increase your exposure as an author? The publication market for poetry book reviews is surprisingly easy to break into! Writing reviews offers many benefits for you as the reviewer: publication credits, resume building, increased exposure and networking opportunities, and a deeper reading experience and appreciation for poetry. Reviewing books is also good literary citizenship. This presentation will cover the basics of what to include in a poetry book review and how to structure it, tips for taking notes while reading the book to simplify the reviewing process, and how to use published reviews to increase exposure as a writer. I’ll also discuss strategies for choosing books to review and matching reviews with appropriate markets, the pros and cons of including negative information, and how to share published reviews on the free site Goodreads to increase exposure. Attendees will receive a resources handout that includes a list of paying and nonpaying book review markets.

Janice Northerns of Liberal (D-7) is the author of Some Electric Hum, 2021 winner of the KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award,  the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award from the University of Kansas, and  a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. Her poetry has been widely published, and her book reviews have been published in journals such as The Rumpus and The Rupture. The author grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Creative Writing Award. Other honors include a Brush Creek Foundation writing residency, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and numerous awards for individual poems. She and her husband have lived in Liberal since 1998. When not writing, Janice enjoys dog walks, cooking, and kayaking.

Janice Northerns (D7) of Liberal is featured in the latest podcast by Fall for the Book, produced by George Mason University in Virginia. Hosts Suzy Rigby and Kara Oakley interview Janice about the landscape and its influence on her writing, balancing teaching and writing, and more.  Janice also shares a couple of poems from her book and discusses inspiration for her second poetry collection, currently in progress.

​Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the 2021 KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award, the KU Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. Her work has been widely published in literary journals, and she recently won the River Heron Review Editors’ Prize for her poem, “The Bleeding Edge.” Click on the link below to listen to the podcast:
 
https://soundcloud.com/user-806669177/fallforthebook_janicenortherns

Whether you are new to ekphrasis or an old hand at it, the practice can offer both a concrete anchor to start a piece as well as a sail to push your writing in a new direction. Janice Northerns will read several ekphrastic poems from her award-winning collection Some Electric Hum and share tips to help you take ekphrastic writing to the next level. The discussion will be geared toward prose writers as well as poets.

​Optional: Those who plan to attend are invited to write ahead of time a poem or flash prose piece responding to the painting “Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed” by Vincent Van Gogh (1887). You can view the painting at this museum link:
https://krollermuller.nl/en/vincent-van-gogh-four-sunflowers-gone-to-seed-1

Janice Northerns, of Liberal, is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the 2021 KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award, the KU Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Award for Creative Writing. Her work has been widely published in literary journals. Honors include a Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts residency, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, and numerous awards for individual poems. Janice and her husband moved to Liberal in 1998, where she taught English at Seward County Community College before retiring in 2019 to write full-time. The landscapes and people of West Texas and southwest Kansas are a steady source of inspiration for her poetry.
 
 
 
Book Description:
 “Some Electric Hum reads … like a treatise on the ways communities are crafted by wanting, having, and then letting go. … This book exemplifies her skill in giving language to those fragile and ephemeral experiences of connection, as well as her determination to understand how connection might be felt in the barely perceptible hum of a completed circuit, closed but still alive with alternating electric currents.”
— Dr. Sandra Cox, judge for the Nelson Poetry Book Award
 

Janice Northerns (D-7), of Liberal, will read several poems, including “The Bleeding Edge,” winner of the 2021 River Heron Review Editors’ Prize, at a Zoom poetry reading at 6 p.m. (CST) Mar. 10, 2022. Janice is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the 2021 KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award, the KU Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry.

The poetry reading is sponsored by River Heron Review and will also include the four finalists in the contest. The Zoom event is free and open to the public, but you must register AHEAD OF TIME to receive the meeting information and password.

Click HERE to register.

Saturday, January 15, 2022, starting at 10:00am

District 2 Monthly Meeting - Members of any district are welcome to attend.

Janice Northerns of Liberal (D7) has a new flash CNF piece in Scrawl Place, a journal focusing on writing about place. Janice is the author of Some Electric Hum, 2021 winner of the KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award and the KU Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award.

​Read her nonfiction piece here. 

There were several nominees this year that made excellent use of visual art alongside their original verse, and I was charmed enough by each of them that I struggled to put them in a comparable context with works that did not include a visual antecedent for the poetry. The engaging and immediate doodles that illustrate Ruth Maus's Valentine and the historicizations that Mark Scheel offers as paratext for Joseph Maino’s photographs in Star Chaser were both enchanting, but I think the most impressive entrant from this subgenre of poetry was by Robert L. Dean, Jr. I found the intertextual ekphrastic play between Dean’s poems and Steven Schroeder’s watercolors in The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing worked to emphasize the elastic exchange of aesthetic impressions that the images create as context for the poems. I was delighted to find references to REM peppered alongside allusions to Homeric verse, both given equal weight as vehicles for transtextual poetic maneuvers managed with aplomb. 
 
In spite of how impressed I was with that book, I ultimately decided that I must use the verse alone as a means of adjudication. In an effort to decide using that criterion, I noted that three poets in particular—Brian Daldorph, Michael Poage, and Janice Northerns—made use of intricate formal structures for some of their poems but also included poetry that felt highly naturalistic, improvisational, or even overheard. All three poets somehow made at least two disparate modes of narrative verse fit easily into their three respective volumes, and since the Nelson prize is for a book rather than a single poem, I thought I ought weigh the poetry within each volume in terms of how it functions as a unified whole. 
 
Daldorph’s sequencing of Kansas Poems worked beautifully a means by which to evoke the cycles of seasons and human lives; those cycles are woven into the content of poetry, whether rendered individually in bursts of uncomfortable confession, as in “The Football Coach’s Wife,” or colloquially, as is the case for mundane childhood remembrances or even for lists, as in “Laurel Avenue,” that all feel strangely profound in spite of their everyday qualities. Each poem is a small textured fragment given meaning by its place in a larger mosaic that creates an image of Kansas as both a landscape and a cultural context for the residual agrarian rhythms that still shape the early 20th Century.
 
Likewise, the narrative voice in Poage’s You Must Have Your Famine is less varied than the speakers who make up Daldorph's polyphonic mosaic, but the form of Poage’s poetry shifts from the controlled and neoclassical (perhaps most obviously on display in “Scottish Sonnet”) to the conversational and postmodern (“Affection,” for instance, seems as much a review of Lahiri’s The Lowlands as a musing on what love looks like from the outside). As the going-away and coming-home of the poems’ speaker pushes readers away and then pulls them close by turns, the mode of address moves from proud to vulnerable and back around by way of shame and delight, which is surely an achievement of narrative suture owed to the poet’s great skill.
 
In spite of the achievements I’ve noted in Maus, Scheel, Dean, Daldorph and Poage’s collections, I think my favorite of the nominated books is Some Electric Hum. Like Daldorph, Northerns excels at embedding a depth of characterization in an abbreviated sketch of her poem’s speakers, some of whom seem to confess or extemporize in direct address to her readers. Not all the narrative poems function this way; some of the speakers are spied upon from around hospital corners or just-glimpsed in family histories told by distant cousins to readers who find themselves embarrassed witnesses of private dramas and secret tragedies. Northern crafts tender portraits of women held hostage by desire, imagining them in a kind of atemporal community, grappling together with transgenerational trauma and pedestrian misogyny. The poems “Boys Would Come on Horses,” “Zinnia Women,” and “Mother-daughter Dresses” fit together like a puzzle, and their shared thematic content sets up a series of formal poems about marriage in the final section of the volume. This section also achieves the combination of craft with innovation that was so apparent in Poage’s verse; Northerns includes a modified sestina about what holds married people together, a fourteener-ballad about how sometimes marriages fall apart anyway, and an open-verse musing on what it means to watch a once-dear loved one slowly pass away. Whether considering family, motherhood or romantic connections, Some Electric Hum reads to me like a treatise on the ways communities are crafted by wanting, having, and then letting go. Perhaps this year more than any other, readers may wish to consider how desire, possession and loss might become meaningful if understood as necessary preconditions for human connectedness. Janice Northerns uses her poetry to explore how wanting, needing, and even withholding are the practices by which families are forged, maintained, and, when necessary, broken. This book exemplifies her skill in giving language to those fragile and ephemeral experiences of connection, as well as her determination to understand how connection might be felt in the barely perceptible hum of a completed circuit, closed but still alive with alternating electric currents. For this reason, I feel that her work is most deserving of this year's Nelson Award and I congratulate her on the achievement. 
 
All best,
Dr. Sandra Cox

​Janice Northerns of Liberal (District 7) has been named a 2021 WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry for her book Some Electric Hum (Lamar University Literary Press, 2020). The award, named after Pulitzer Prize winning author Willa Cather, recognizes the best literature featuring women’s or girls’ stories set in the North American West. Women Writing the West (WWW), a nonprofit association, underwrites and presents the nationally recognized award annually at the WWW Fall Conference. A winner and two finalists in eight categories were selected by a panel of professional librarians, historians, and university-affiliated educators.
 
“I am thrilled and grateful to be honored by such a prestigious organization,” Northerns said. “Publishing my first poetry collection last year was a long-held dream, and for Some Electric Hum to win an award makes it even more meaningful.”
 
Some Electric Hum is available for purchase from all major online retailers. Signed copies are available through her website at www.janicenortherns.com or by emailing Northerns directly.