Dr. Raye

Love getting to be part of this cool series & complain about Southern stereotypes!!!

Thank you!!!!!!!

Thank you so much!!!

Thank you!!

Thank you!!!

Oh my goodness, can't believe I missed this--thank you so so so much. I'm truly honored 🩶🩶🩶🩶🩶

Truly a gift to be held & understood like this 🩶🩶🩶🩶🩶🩶🩶🩶

It's also especially significant to me for a couple more reasons: 1st, it's sponsored in part by my late grandmother Dusti's alma mater, Berea College; & 2nd, my MA thesis advisor, blurber, mentor, friend, & fellow Appalachian poet Rose McLarney is a past winner of this award. I'm so grateful 🩶✨️

Hi Raye, Ready? Set? Go! CONGRATULATIONS! After much deliberation over incredibly high-quality submissions, I'm pleased to share that your book, What Good is Heaven, has won the 2024 Weatherford Award for the Best Poetry book about Appalachia. Congratulations to EVERYONE who helped! btw, Here is a link so you can see the esteemed company that you now keep. If you scroll to the bottom & click "past winners" you'll behold the 55 year tradition of which are now a part! The Weatherford Awards are given by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association annually to honor books that “best illuminate the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.” The three categories recognized are fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The conferring of this annual $500 award in each of the three categories has come to be recognized as a major Appalachian event.

The speakers in What Good Is Heaven inhabit those contradictory spaces in Raye Hendrix’s riveting depictions of life in the mountains of North Alabama: the beauty and the blood-letting of farming, the community and the alienation of small town life, and the love for and the revulsion of queer youth cultivated inside the church and inside the home. These poems are splendidly crafted, melodious, and candid, and hearten readers to consider and reconsider their own experiences and ideologies inside Appalachia.—Marianne Worthington

I'm so excited to share that my book, What Good Is Heaven, has won the Weatherford Award for Best Appalachian Poetry! This is the highest honor in Appalachian literature & it's validating to be recognized as part of this tradition, to have my deep love for my Southern Appalachian home seen & known.

Image of the poem "Any Coyote" by Raye Hendrix. The page is dogeared. Like tongues of fire on the mountain the red tails of fox squirrels flicker as they run from our presence-- the crunch of my boots, chaotic joy of my large yellow dog who follows them like smoke. This morning my father sent me out with a rifle. We're meant to searching for something but I can't remember what. The woods are like that. Dark spokes of evergreen wheel overhead to obscure all that lives beneath and above--their needles sew away the sky. Behind us an owl questions everything, and in the clear cold air the boulders--wihtout their spring muffle of moss--repeat the inquiry. Today even the wind won't whisper its guesses through the bare branches of trees less fortunate

than pine. The long ghost of its body quick and gray, a coyote wisps through the brush. My dog pursues it out of sight, returns with one of our missing chickens hanging broken from his jaw. Yes, that's right: my father sent us after the coyote-- my dog to find and I to shoot it-- while he repairs the plundered coop. /The/ coyote, he said. By which he means: /any/ coyote. My dog leads me back to the coyote's den: a hole full of red feathers, gnawed bone, the old blue collar of someone's missing cat. No--I mean /anyone's/ cat. The mountain doesn't know any of our names.

"The mountain / doesn't know any of our names" @rayehendrix.bsky.social

oh my goooooosh 😭💖😭💖😭💖😭💖😭💖😭💖

The third time????!!!!!!!!! I'm so lucky wtf

“This commission statement refers to people with Autism, ADHD, asthma, auto-immune disease, and chronic illness as a “dire threat to the American people and our way of life”.

This is a manifesto against disability.

This is the language of eugenics.” - Erin Biba

www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

It is mind-boggling to me that people say "but I had to comply with the fascists because otherwise there would be some cost—"

NO FUCKING KIDDING. Did you think you'd never have to make a hard choice in Fascist America? That you wouldn't be asked to sacrifice someone and be rewarded for it?? JFC

Call For Interviews: Dis/Connect is seeking a thoughtful reader to conduct an interview with author Sarah Fawn Montgomery to discuss her new craft book, Nerve: Unlearning the Ableist Writing Workshop to Develop a Disabled Writing Practice, forthcoming from Sundress Publications on March 4, 2025. Contact Raye Hendrix at raye@anomalouspress.org with interest and to receive a digital review copy of Nerve. We aim to publish this interview by mid-late March or early April.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and the poetry chapbooks Regenerate: Poems of Mad Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2017), Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and The Astronaut Checks His Watch (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She also has a craft book on unlearning the ableist workshop and developing a disabled writing practice forthcoming with Sundress Publications and a short collection of flash nonfiction forthcoming with Harbor Editions. Her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays many times, and her poetry and prose have appeared in Brevity, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Electric Literature, LitHub, New England Review, The Normal School, Passages North, Poetry Foundation, The Rumpus, Southeast Review, Terrain, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA in creative writing from California State University-Fresno and a PhD in English in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.

Check out @sfmontgomery.bsky.social 's essay, "Unlearning the Ableist Writing Workshop," and if you're inspired, reach out to interview her about her new craft book, Nerve: Unlearning the Ableist Writing Workshop to Develop a Disabled Writing Practice!

Email raye@anomalouspress.org for more info!

Dis/Connect is on Bluesky! Follow us here!

'He's Building a Concentration Camp': Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo | Common Dreams "There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in...

"There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."

www.commondreams.org/news/gitmo-c...

THIS IS HUGE! Researchers have developed a nasal COVID-19 vaccine that BLOCKS transmission of the virus. This suggests vaccines delivered directly to the nose or mouth could play a CRITICAL role in containing the spread of respiratory infections. Phase I clinical trials HAVE BEEN APPROVED! 🧪🧵⬇️

Chapbook cover, mostly black with the title “RIOT” in jangly red letters inside a rough white circle cutout from the black, the author’s name “Gwendolyn Brooks” in white in a dramatic serif font across the middle of the cover, and in smaller white letters at the bottom, “Broadside Press $1.00”

Scan of two pages, title page on the right and a reproduction of a painting on the left. The title page has a similar title logo, “RIOT” in red letters inside a rough circle drawn in red, author “Gwendolyn Brooks” below it. Other text on title page: “Frontispiece by Jeff Donaldson,” “Broadside Press, 12651 Old Mill Place, Detroit, Michigan 48238.” The painting on the left side depicts two young Black men wearing white shirts and tan pants, one man standing nearer than the other holding a wooden African statue like a club, the man behind him holding his hand up with palm out like a warning, both with serious and thoughtful expressions on their faces, 1960s haircuts, the nearer man’s a little longer than the others. The nearer man’s white shirt has a collar and is open at the chest, tied in a knot near his midsection. The man behind him is wearing a t-shirt. Their figures are broken up and abstracted around the corner regions of the panting into stabs of color, congealing into dark patches around the background man’s head like a halo and sort of around the head of the statue in lower right of the painting, more like that part of the painting is bruised. The word “Glass” floats sidewise, twice, in big bold black block letters in front of the nearer man’s head. If you look closely, the word “Glass” is there much smaller among some of the abstract colors, along with the word “Sheet” a little ways away. Below the painting, text reads: “Allah Shango” by Jeff Donaldson. The painting was the Purchase Award Winner at the exhibit Black Expressions ‘69, at the Southside Community Art Center, Chicago

Scan of a poem on a page: Title in bold a the top: “RIOT” An epigraph below that in smaller text, “A riot is the language of the unheard. -MARTIN LUTHER KING” Text of the poem: “John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe, all whitebluerose below his golden hair, wrapped richly in right linen and right wool, almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff; almost forgot Grandtully (which is The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim's, the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri. Because the Negroes were coming down the street. Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty (not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka) and they were coming toward him in rough ranks. In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud. And not detainable. And not discreet. Gross. Gross. "Que tu es grossier!" John Cabot itched instantly beneath the nourished white that told his story of glory to the World. "Don't let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!" he whispered to any handy angel in the sky.” The page number “9” on the bottom

Back cover of the chapbook, with a black and white author photo of Gwendolyn Brooks, a head & shoulders portrait of a middle-aged Black woman with her hair in a short plain Afro and a friendly frown-smile expression on her face, wearing a soft collar shirt with top button buttoned. Text below the photo that reads: “RIOT is a poem in three parts, only one part of which has appeared in print before. It arises from the disturbances in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. “Riot. By Gwendolyn Brooks, $1.00 “Broadside Press, 12651 Old Mill Place, Detroit, Michigan 48238”

Here’s a link to a scanned copy of RIOT by Gwendolyn Brooks, published in 1969 by Broadside Press in Detroit.

“It arises from the disturbances in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968”
#BlackHistoryMonth

eclipsearchive.org/projects/RIO...

I think maybe it's more of a south vs. deep south? I used to go by SEC teams but that's gotten so strange lately that it doesn't make sense anymore. I think your measure makes sense though re: former Confederate states

I'll be honest that when I think of the south I tend not to think of the Virginias immediately! They seem more like the core of Appalachia, but I could also see an argument for them being southern!

I can't apply this year because I left the South for a few years for grad school (heartbroken, tbh) but I know lots of southern poets who would be great for this!

***Note that you have to have lived in the same state for two consecutive years, though!

Any university that voluntarily shutters a DEI program, office or personnel “Because of Trumps Executive Order” is making a PR decision. Not a legal one.

Trumps EO does not change anti discrimination law. If anything, the EO is unlawful.

Universities should treat it that way.

Alt text 3/3: Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?

--A.R. Moxon

Alt text 2: ...or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore. They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after.

Alt text 1: Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism...

Thank you for doing this! I'm still figuring out BlueSky so glad to know about this bot!