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In Conversation: M. Soledad Caballero

To kick off National Poetry Month this year, the poet M. Soledad Caballero joined us to read from and talk about her new book, I Was A Bell, winner of the 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize. It was a joy to talk with Soledad because she is warm and generous and diligent in her craft.

I first met Soledad in 2006. We had both signed up to take Rebecca Morgan Frank’s Master Class in Poetry at Grub Street. We spent 10 weeks together sharing and learning from each other. We were poets who trusted each other deeply, which was such a pleasure to experience. 

At the end of the class, I solicited poems from everyone to make a chapbook in which we asked Morgan to write the introduction. As I was getting ready for this event, I tracked down the chapbook and re-read the introduction, where Morgan writes: “the steady intelligent voice of Soledad’s image-rich work…” This is a great description of Soledad’s work, though it has matured much since we last workshopped.

In her new book, Soledad visits spaces no one can  access anymore, reaching into her past to evoke the horror of Pinochet’s Chile and the upheaval of immigrating to the U.S. Threaded with poems about cancer, she deftly parallels these two journeys both of which violence/harm initiates. What I take away from this book is that always where there is heartache, there is love. 

Even though it was sixteen years ago, that workshop bonded me with poets I am still connected to, in that we still champion each other’s successes. I was so thrilled to have Soledad at the Notebooks Collective to discuss her new book and all things writing. 

The Event

About M. Soledad Caballero

Soledad is Professor of English and co-chair of the WGSS Program at Allegheny College. She is a Macondo and a CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, was winner of the 2019 Joy Harjo poetry contest by Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts and the 2020 SWWIM’s SWWIM-For-the-Fun-of-It contest. Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, the Crab Orchard Review, and other venues. Her collection, I Was a Bell, won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize, Red Hen Press 2021. She is an avid tv watcher and a terrible birder. Visit her website.

You can purchase I WAS A BELL at our bookshop.org store for The Notebooks Collective.

Book Launch With Randall Horton

On March 1, 2022, the Notebooks Collective hosted memoirist/poet/musician/teacher Randall Horton for the release of his second memoir, Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays, published by Northwestern University Press. The event was moderated by Ashley Monet Johnson and included guests Mark Johnson and Gary Lyles.

About the Event

Randall asked Mark and Gary to help him launch this book because he wanted a different kind of discussion. He asked them to be join him because they knew him before he was the Dr. Randall Horton we know today. They knew him when he was Hook, when he smuggled dope, when he was incarcerated.

He asked Ashley to moderate the event for two reasons. First, because she is a remarkably talented emerging writer and second, because she is Mark’s daughter. She’s known Randall as a family friend and as an MFA mentor. Her insight is unparalleled. We hope this is a way for you to hear not just Randall’s work, but also about his life and the transformation he was able to make.

The Launch

About Randall

RANDALL HORTON is the author of a previous memoir and several books of poetry, including Pitch Dark Anarchy: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2013) and The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street. In 2019 he served as poet-in-residence for the Civil Rights Corps in Washington, DC, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to challenging systemic injustice in the American legal system. The recipient of numerous awards, including the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea González Poetry, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a Right to Return Fellowship from the Soze Foundation, he currently sits on the Advisory Board of PEN America’s PEN Prison Writing Program. He is a professor of English at the University of New Haven.

About Ashley

Ashley Johnson’s essays have appeared in Sleet, Glassworks, and Iron City Magazine. Her essay Sing was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. She is currently working on a hybrid-memoir that examines the residual effects of mass incarceration on the Black family structure. Ashley holds her MFA from the Solstice MFA Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College, MA in Education from UMUC, and BS in Criminal Justice from Marymount University. Ashley currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland with her husband and their two sons.