From the Stacks is a regular series on the Poetry Center Blog in which we solicit authors to wander our library and choose books that have been important to them and/or that they recommend.
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books Print Quarterly Journal, American Short Fiction, the Georgia Review, Pleiades, Madison Review, Bat City Review, Nashville Review, Smoke Long Quarterly, Café Irreal, Santa Monica Review, Faultline, Devil’s Lake Review, Nat.Brut., Bellevue Literary Review, audio download through Bound Off, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction and finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award. Current projects include finishing a new novel, a collection of flash fiction and creative non-fiction. Her home town is Compton, California, and she will join the MFA faculty of California State University, Fresno in the fall of 2018.
Venita's selections From the Stacks are:
Unearthings by Wendy Chen
Receipt: Poems by Carl Adamshick
Lighthead by Terrance Hayes
Teeth by Aracelis Girmay
The Venus Hottentot by Elizabeth Alexander
Mondo Barbie edited by Richard Peabody & Lucinda Ebersole
You Are Happy by Margaret Atwood
Girl Soldier by Denise Duhamel
The Woman With Two Vaginas by Denise Duhamel
When My Brother Was An Aztec by Natalie Diaz
At the Drive-In Volcano by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Isla Negra by Pablo Neruda
Survival Supervivencia by Miguel Algarin
Olio by Tyehimba Jess