Sherry Chandler

Kudzu and Appalshop

At 7:00 pm tonight, Donna Sparkman of Hazard Community and Technical College will be talking about the latest edition of Kudzu on the Appalshop radio station WMMT-FM. Students from Hazard Community and Technical College will share their poetry.

You can listen on streaming audio at http://appalshop.org/wmmt/ or listen to it at 88.7 on your FM dial.

[Update: Listening and participating in this broadcast last night, I learned two astonishing things.

• First, Kudzu is free. The cost is covered by Hazard Community and Technical College. This year’s magazine has over 100 pages – with poems from me, E. Gail Chandler, and Kelli Norman Ellis, among others (the reading of the list went fast and I tended to remember names I recognize) – so underwriting it is no small service to the writing community.
• Second, money for the prizes, about $400 this year I think, is raised by the students through a series of events such as dinners called Eating Poetry, after the Mark Strand poem. People from the community get together for a potluck/bake sale kind of thing and read poetry to one another, their own and other people’s.

They also said about 150 people attend these annual Kudzu readings. That’s a tremendous audience, and not all of them students coming for extra credit apparently.

Tremendous energy devoted to creative writing out of HCTC. We should all be grateful.

Possibly related posts:

Kudzu Poetry Prize

Kudzu

Kudzu Magazine

Evening with Poets

Kudzu Non-Metaphorical

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