Parenthood in a Time of Dread

Bio: Craig Beaven
Craig Beaven earned an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University and PhD from the University of Houston. Beaven’s collections of poetry are Natural History (Gerald Cable Book Award, 2019), Teaching English Lit on the Day After a Shooting (CutBank Chapbook Prize Winner), and Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You (Anhinga Press Poetry Prize). He is a recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Carolina Quarterly, Hollins Critic, Atlanta Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, the Best New Poets anthology, and many others. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida. www.craigbeaven.com.

Selected by Pulitzer Prize finalist Ellen Bass, Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You explores the political and social climate of the last 6 years through the lens of the author’s mixed-race family. The long title poem uses teaching in a classroom—in a world of classroom gun violence—to meditate on love, race, language, and terror.  The second sequence makes those fears personal and individual, while the third traces these topics to the deep historical past. Throughout, Beaven asks questions about the idea of terror in a world where terror and violence are perpetrated by the government, police officers, students, and neighbors hiding behind social media aliases. In poems narrative and complex, Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You reclaims the power of selfhood and language.  

Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize; House of Sugar, House of Stone; and two chapbooks. She co-edited the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, her poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Poetry, and Fairy Tale Review, and her reviews appear in RHINO, LA Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Georgia Review. She teaches in Denver, where she lives with her family. Find more at www.emilyperez.org.

In What Flies Want, disaster looms in domesticity: a family grapples with its members’ mental health, a marriage falters, and a child experiments with self-harm. With its backdrop of school lockdown drills, #MeToo, and increasing political polarization, the collection asks how these private and public tensions are interconnected.