We're pleased to announce that we'll be attending the annual RVA Booklovers' Festival in support of Diode authors and in celebration of regional poetry!
Diode authors Remica Bingham-Risher and Paul Guest will be reading select poems from their new books as part of the Richmond festival's poetry lineup. Remica Bingham-Risher, author of three volumes of poetry, is a nominee for the 2018 Library of Virginia Literary Awards for her latest book Starlight & Error. Charlottesville poet Paul Guest is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and Whiting Writers' Award and author of four volumes of poetry including Because Everything Is Terrible. Come out to hear live poetry, purchase a book and get it signed at the Diode Editions press booth!
Remica Bingham-Risher, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, is an alumna of Old Dominion University and Bennington College. She is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet. Among other journals, her work has been published in The Writer’s Chronicle, New Letters, Callaloo and Essence. She is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013) shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Award and Starlight & Error (Diode Editions, 2017) winner of the Diode Editions Book Award. She is the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University and resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children.
How do we save what’s coming? The love between two people, cut through by error and time, often marks the path for those who follow. In Starlight & Error, the legacies of love between aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, children and their children’s children is re-told through the lens of imagined memory. In the difficult landscape of the present, is black love revolutionary? Are faith and forgiveness? Here, the history of love—fraught with fear and light, war and hunger, distance and gravity—is always asking: how do we transcend the mistakes of those who made us? Can music save us? Can the stars?
“In Starlight & Error, Remica Bingham-Risher redefines the beat of the heart not only in the adult situations of romantic love but also in the adult decisions within the love of family. The scope of her vision helps us see into our own lives with a sharper focus. At a time in America when we need hope the most, this book offers us an open path; we no longer “wonder what other secrets/ we’ve been keeping/ on this side of the world.” Here—in her songs of forgetfulness and of memory, songs of the closed fist and the open palm, songs of regrets and of gratitude—we clearly see a world worth fighting for.” — A. Van Jordan
Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions in 2018. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers' Award, Guest teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.
“With vital, pulsating, elegiac poems that puncture the world with their tenderness and awful truths, Paul Guest has once again proven he’s a brilliant poet raging both against and in defense of the world. Here are shiver-inducing poems that look steadily into our current destructive times and still manage to sing of love, desire, of something worth saving.” — Ada Limón
