Volume 07, Chapter 03 | January 2020

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Image by Charles Dana Gibson / British Library

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2020. We made it! Today is simultaneously the end of an era and a new beginning and it feels like the perfect time to reflect on some of the amazing achievements of Visual Verse and of our writer community.

Visual Verse, first published in November 2013, is now in its seventh volume. We have published over 6700 pieces of original writing in 75 monthly issues. We have featured established writers like Ali Smith, Niven Govinden and Chika Unigwe; exciting contemporary voices including Amrou Al-Khadi, Irenosen Okojie, Paul Ewen, Eley Williams, Carmen Marcus and Enda Walsh and up-and-coming writers like Nisha Ramayya, Elieen McNulty Holmes, Ashley Hickson-Lovence and Sarvat Hasin whose work deserves to be read. We have also featured writers like Rishi Dastidar, Susanna Crossman and Angela Young, who are among a stable of Visual Verse contributors consistently producing work we hugely admire. Alongside our leads we have published you: more than 2500 individual writers from every corner of the globe. Thanks to you, Visual Verse is truly a living, breathing literary organism.

We are equally proud of our curatorial record, with 75 carefully selected image prompts from individual artists like Daniel Frost, Penny Byrne, Marc Schlossman, Hernan Bas and Hannah Coulson; world-class galleries and organisations like NASA, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Bodleian Libraries and M Leuven and partners like Creative Review who published a selection of Visual Verse writers in print. Visual Verse continues to thrive thanks to the energy, creativity and generosity of our writers, readers, artists and partners. Thank you all for an incredible few years.

So let’s begin the year with a visual prompt so bold that it sets the tone for owning 2020. The image is by Charles Dana Gibson courtesy of the British Library archive.

To inspire you even more, we have three powerful lead writers all breaking new ground with their cross-genre work. We are inordinately proud and excited to start the year with a piece by Mary Jean Chan (http://www.maryjeanchan.com/) , a London-based poet, editor and critic from Hong Kong. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and current guest co-editor of The Poetry Review for Spring 2020. In 2019, Mary Jean was named as one of Jackie Kay’s 10 Best BAME writers in the UK as a part of the British Council’s and the National Centre for Writing’s International Literature Showcase. She came Second in the 2017 National Poetry Competition and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem twice. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2019 and won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2018. Her debut collection, Flèche, is published by Faber & Faber and is currently shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award. Fingers crossed she wins!

On page two, it’s an honour to publish Noo Saro-Wiwa (https://www.noosarowiwa.com) who was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England. Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria was named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2012, and selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. It has been translated into French and Italian, and in 2016 it won the Albatros Literature Prize in Italy. Noo has also written book reviews, travel, opinion and analysis articles for The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect magazine, New York Times and City AM, among others.

And, we gave our final page to a writer we have published regularly over our 6 years and three months in the game! With only 48 hours notice, our page 3 lead is by Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist, Susanna Crossman (https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com/) . She is the winner of the 2019 LoveReading Very Short Story Award and has recent/upcoming work in Neue Rundschau, (2019) S. Fischer (translated into German) alongside John Berger and Anne Carson, We’ll Never Have Paris, Repeater Books (2019), Trauma, Dodo Ink (2020), Berfrois, The Creative Review, 3:AM Journal, The Lonely Crowd, Litro and more… She was nominated for Best of The Net (2018) for her non-fiction essays, her fiction has been short-listed for awards such as the Bristol Prize and Glimmertrain. Susanna just completed her debut novel, Dark Island and is represented by Craig Literary, NY. When she’s not writing, she works internationally as a clinical arts-therapist and lecturer.

What more could you ask for? Now that the holiday season is coming to an end, it’s time to sharpen your pencils, dear writers… The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Happy New Year!

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 05, Chapter 09 | July 2018

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Image by Namroud Gorguis
Guest Editor: Richard Georges

Dear writers, readers and friends,

We do get around. Words circle and come back. Lives and geographies and time fold and touch. We talk and we talk and we talk. Back in May, our editor was delighted to take part in a panel for Bare Lit (http://barelitfestival.com/) , the UK’s literary festival featuring writers of colour working in every genre you can think of. Over chats about mythology and monsters, Preti met poet Richard Georges, who is from the British Virgin Islands. They got talking about colonial territories, and Preti invited him to curate Visual Verse for July. Richard is the author of the poetry collections Make Us All Islands (Shearsman Books) and Giant (Platypus Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prelude, Smartish Pace, The Poetry Review, wildness, Wasafiri, decomP, The Rusty Toque, Reservoir, L’Ephemere, The White Review and elsewhere.

About his Visual Verse selection, Richard says, ‘I am delighted to compile work for Visual Verse solicited exclusively from some of the most spellbinding poets I know who also happen to be citizens of colonial spaces. Ana Portnoy Brimmer from Puerto Rico (an unincorporated territory of the United States), Arturo Desimone from Aruba (a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), and Chris Astwood from Bermuda, Erika Jeffers from Montserrat, and myself from the British Virgin Islands (all British Overseas Territories).’ We are delighted to have Richard’s own work in our lead spot, followed by this brilliant selection.

Ana Portnoy Brimmer is a Puerto Rican poet whose work has been published or is forthcoming in Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Puerto Rico en mi Corazón, Kweli Journal, Poets Reading The News, Project Censored, Centro Journal, Moko, and elsewhere. For more on her work, visit her website (http://anaportnoybrimmer.com/ ) .

Arturo Desimone (http://arturoblogito.wordpress.com) is an Arubian-Argentinian writer and visual artist. His articles, poetry, and short fiction have previously appeared in CounterPunch, Círculo de Poesía, Moko, Drunken Boat, Acentos Review, and New Orleans Review. His translations have appeared in Blue Lyra Review and Adirondack Review.

Chris Astwood (http://www.chrisastwood.com/) is a Bermudian poet currently residing in the UK and completing a PhD in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia. His writing has recently appeared in sx Salon and Caribbean Quarterly. A pamphlet of linked poems entitled JANE DOE is forthcoming from Gatehouse Press.

And finally, Erika Jeffers (https://www.erikajeffers.com/) – a poet and book reviewer whose writing has appeared in Kweli, Callaloo, sx salon, Wasafiri, Adrienne, and Moko; she’s also a reader for Frontier Poetry. Currently based in Brooklyn, she’s at work on her first full-length poetry collection.

All of them have responded to an image so full of stories, potential, surveillance, entropy and nostalgia – captured by Namroud Gorguis via Unsplash. And so to the long month of July, with all of its potential. Let’s make these worlds of words speak to each other. Looking forward to your submissions dear writers – the image is the starting point, the text is up to you. _x005F _x005F

Richard Georges (Guest Editor)
with Preti, Lucie and Kristen