Author: Mattie Quesenberry Smith, Ph.D.
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River City Poets “Words on Fire: Poetry Happy Hour”
On Wednesday, February 26, 2025, from 5:45 to 8:00 PM, please join me for a 30-minute reading with the River City Poets for their “Words on Fire: Poetry Happy Hour,” at the Firehouse Theatre, 1609 West Broad Street, Richmond, Virginia, 23220. I am happy to meet up with Joanna Suzanne Lee, Richmond’s own poet laureate…
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The Williamsburg Book Festival Celebrates Its Tenth Year
I had a fantastic time at the 10th Annual Williamsburg Book Festival on Saturday, February 22, 2025. It was busy! There were 50 authors and 5 publishers in the Williamsburg Community Building! The book festival included genres for all readers, and the organizers also included food trucks that served delicious hot sandwiches and snacks. After…
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Tupelo Press 30/30: The Aftermath
It has been twenty-four days since I posted my last first draft on Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project page for December. What a tight squeeze to draft a new poem per day throughout the holidays! This rapid-fire process helped my poetic peers and me gain noticeable momentum and insight during our writing marathon. For example, I…
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I Hope to Write a Poem a Day in the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project
To kick off my appointment as Virginia’s poet laureate, I hope to draft a new poem every day in December 2024, so I can support the 30/30 Project at Tupelo Press. If you want to learn more about this project, please check out the website at Tupelo Press, and feel free to follow the process…
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Leaving October
October, 2024 The reds finish first—maple, dogwoods, and sullen oaks—My husband inherits the harder work, so he trims the grassBack for the last time and scrapes all the edges cleanAlong the flower beds. He rakes gravel, leaves, andTypical debris, but this time he sees other castaways.Plugged with dirt, twenty years old and older, theseAre a…
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Complexity and Chaos: Sensible Nonsense
The woodcut print at the end of this post is its apt punctuation. A part of a series of apocalyptic prints inspired by The Revelation of St. John, this one is called “St. John Devours the Book,” by Albrecht Durer, 1497-1498 AD.” What sense does it make to anyone? Now: I wanted to add this…
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Sacred Harp Singing: Glossolalia, Polyphony, and Participatory Singing
What possible value could untrained, localized voices have for singing? None, especially in this age of commercialism where we can buy the best for our listening pleasure, passive though our listening is. Could participatory singing be more valuable for community building than the more passive state of “listening” most of us are accustomed to today?…
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Scaling: Michael Martone Explores Perspective in His Prose Poem “Scale”
“From the air, the world, falling away below, grew so small.” is the opener for Michael Martone‘s prose poem “Scale,” appearing in Pleiades, Volume 34, Issue 1. This poem explores the lives of Art Smith, “The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne,” and Paul Guillow, a naval aviator whom Smith meets during the Great War. The single…
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Luna Ridge
I named this ridge on which I live Luna Ridge, because it seems the moon is never too far away, but the most scintillating moments here have actually been those experienced in the absence of her cool light, when darkness draws its own luminescence from galaxies abroad. These are moments when I look up into…
Poet Laureate of Virginia 