Matt Donovan & Jenny George

Drunk as a Poet on Payday

Something special today everyone! Double poet day! My guests are Matt Donovan and Jenny George, coauthors of the new chapbook, We Are Not Where We Are, published this week by Bull City Press. The book is an erasure of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. It’s fascinating to hear the two of them, long-time friends, talk about how they worked together on the project and what they were looking to do with the work.

Matt Donovan is the author of the poetry collections The Dug-Up Gun Museum and Vellum, among others, and the collection of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan lives in Massachusetts and serves as the Director of The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

Jenny George is the author of After Image and The Dream of Reason and the chapbook * (asterisk). She is also a winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Narrative, Granta, The Iowa Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

Pick up a copy of We Are Not Where We Are here.

And while you’re at it, grab Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum and George’s After Image.

Read more about Donovan here and George here.

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