I am happy to announce that Red Mountain Press has accepted Previous Lives for publication in the fall of 2018. The working subtitle is, New and Selected Early Poems. The book will include “best of” selections from my first eight books, as well as recent work,

I was honored to have Breaking Down Familiar selected by Erin Belieu as an Honorable Mention for the 2017 National Federation of State Poetry Societies’ Stevens Award.

Gris-Gris, edited in New Orleans by Jay Udall (brother of the NM Senator), has posted “The Martyr’s Cell,” which I based on a Jorge Borges short story about a prisoner and a tiger.

Matthew Warren of Clackamas Literary Review in Oregon City, OR, notified me of the magazine’s acceptance of “More Than a Howl,” a poem dedicated to the Water Protectors of Standing Rock.  A number of people gave me helpful comments and suggestions on this poem, including Mary Morris, Robyn Hunt, Barbara Rockman, Kim Parko, Anne Haven McDowell, Gary Worth Moody, Wayne Lee, Michael Scofield, and Stephen Bunch.

I was honored to have “The Great Plains in Fog” selected by Elizabeth Tarr to be included in an upcoming issue of The Shining Rock Poetry Review. Her magazine culls poems recently published in other journals, and gets permission to reprint them. Publication in it is by invitation only. Ms. Tarr found my poem in the most recent Valparaiso Review, and picked it along with one by William Wash. It’s an honor to be included in Shining Rock, as the company I’m with in that journal includes such luminaries as Henri Cole, Major Jackson, Eleanor Wilner, Campbell McGrath, Alice Friman, Morri Creech, Tom Hennen, Joseph Bathanti, Natasha Tretheway, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, John Bensko, Jane Hirshfield, Terrance Hayes, Shara McCallum, Clarence Major and William Wright.

Thanks to Molly Wagoner who videoed John Macker and I as we read our poems at Gerald Peters Gallery on October 22, 2017. Four the poems I read can be found on the link page of this website.

Cathryn Hankla, editor at Hollins Critic, in Roanoke, VA, accepted “The Distance,” a poem about negligence and death. The poem came to me very much in its final rhetorical form in response to a prompt in a workshop conducted by Linda Gregerson at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

Thanks to Blair Oliver, editor of the  Fort Collins-based Front Range Review, who accepted “Mudlarking on the Thames” for a 2018 issue.  And thanks to my friend, the artist Marina Brownlow, for introducing me to the practice of mudlarking on the Thames.  Artists and archaeologically inclined persons take advantage of the river’s huge tidal range to discover what might have dropped into the river’s anaerobic mud in London’s 2,000 year history.

I’m grateful that Ellen Waterston and the folks at Playa accepted me for their residency in February of 2018.

The title poem of my chapbook, Kingdom of Ignorance, published by Finishing Line Press, is now online at the Sage Green Journal. It’s a mushroom reverie…you can also hear me reading it via the Selected Poems page of this web site. http://www.sagegreenjournal.org/donald-levering.html