Earlier this month I headed up North to Toronto, Canada for the CCWWP, the two-year-old Canadian version of AWP. The panel was organized by Janelle Adsit, fellow contributor to Dispatches from the Classroom.

I read from my pedagogy essay in that anthology. It was a great to have the opportunity to read from the final incarnation of my essay, after all the revisions I did of it for my comprehensive exams and then, once accepted by the editors, all the additional revisions. Reading it aloud reminded me how much I love teaching and what a gift students are, how they teach me what I don’t know.

After the conference, I walked the streets of Toronto and hit the major tourists spots. By far, the best afternoon was the one I spent lakeside watching the birds, the people, and the sun glinting on that expanse of blue. CCWWP is set for Montreal in 2014. If anyone has a panel they’d like help organize, I’m up for another trip North.

Once I made it back stateside, I headed directly to my residency at the Prairie Center of the Arts. I was a resident here in 2011 and just loved it! It is very safe to say, I’m loving it again. Of the residencies I’ve had, it’s my absolute favorite. New this year, too, is a van to run residents into town, a Friday night dinner, and an increase in residents (I think the director told me PCA is at full capacity. Wow! I would say, maybe even beyond full capacity. I’m not even in the main residence building this year, but in the one next door. It is just absolutely lovely here. I went for a leisurely bike ride this morning through the woodland lined streets, pausing only to watch a blue heron in a lake surrounded by enormous houses.) As for what I’m working on, a little of this and a little of that, but really it’s too soon to tell, though I will say one of the projects is a digital collaboration.

In publishing news, I have poems forthcoming Vermillion Literary Project, Sugar Mule, The New Poet, Naugatuck River Review, Rose Red Review, and in the anthologies Poetry in the Cathedral and Squares and Rebels (Handtype Press). My essay “My Sister’s Ghost” is forthcoming in the anthology After Dark (Diversion Press) due out in September 2012.

And in my series on the chapbook, up next are interviews with J. Hope Stein

and Susana H. Case,

with several others in the works.