Time Is Running Out–Pre-Order Your Copy of Chicken Fat Now!

The pre-order period for Chicken Fat ends August 18.

Note from Barbara: I really hope you’ll check out my book. The poems are personal. The people on the cover? My grandmother, Rose Entel Perlman, an immigrant from Poland, my mother, Lillian Perlman Krasner, and I think that’s my twin sister, Andrea, visible in the stroller. The photo was taken in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where my grandparents lived and my mother was born and raised.

To pre-order your copy, click here>>>

Chicken Fat

 

by Barbara Krasner

 

$13.99

Barbara Krasner’s collection of poems, Chicken Fat, is rich and soulful, redemptive, and full of the soothing spice that makes poetry come alive. She writes about heritage, family, the Jewish experience and identity in a way that is fresh and robust. Her poetry is warm, accessible, and utterly singular in its ability to put you right into the middle of the simmer and let you feel all the spice and ‘fat’ of the human experience. There is a love in these poems that is tangible. She has mastered the art of the ‘living language’—an ability to take very personal moments, the small intimate details of a life, and make them speak to a universal scaffold of truths that anyone can acknowledge. This book is called Chicken Fat but there is nothing excessive here, just the rich and full flavor of poetic voice that is beautifully rendered.

–Matthew Lippman, author of Salami Jew and The New Year of Yellow

In Chicken Fat, Barbara Krasner displays a gift for linking moving memories of her New Jersey Jewish childhood and life with the collective memories of her parents’ and grandparents’ history of the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe. Krasner’s narrative poems contain both directness and tenderness as she details family and personal loss as well as a tenacious endurance.  She demonstrates a rare gift of describing current and traditional Jewish food (kishka, gribenes, lungen stew) in a way that is not only tantalizes but also provides an ethnic background of this endangered cuisine.  Krasner’s Chicken Fat is a powerful book of poems that transcends her personal story and connects to her readers with a compelling immediacy.

–Laura Boss, author of The Best Lover ( New York Quarterly, 2017) and Editor, Lips

To pre-order your copy, click here>>>

 

New One-Day Sessions from The Whole Megillah

It’s Back to School time!  The Whole Megillah is delighted to introduce a series of one-day sessions to take your writing to the next level:

1. Setting and Achieving Your Writing Goals—Learn from an experienced project manager how to set your long- and short-term goals for your writing and hold yourself accountable. Optional: Sign up for a dedicated writing goal-setting and sharing community on a private Facebook page.

• Sunday, September 10, 1-3 pm ET, $30, private Facebook page

2. Sending Your Literary Offerings into the World—Maybe you’ve been reading the monthly report of submissions, acceptances, and rejections from The Whole Megillah and want to send your work out, too. This two-hour session will introduce you to online tools and tracking mechanisms to make the process less intimidating and more efficient.

• Sunday, August 27, 1-3 pm ET, $30, private Facebook page
• Encore, September 17, 1-3 pm, ET, $30, private Facebook page

3. Writing in Real Time—Generate new fiction, nonfiction, and/or poetry by writing to timed prompts using Google Hangouts video chat (if you’re video shy, you can just turn off your computer’s camera). Sessions led by certified Amherst Writers & Artists method facilitator.

• Sunday, October 1, 2-4 pm ET, $30, Google Hangouts
• Sunday, November 5, 2-4 pm ET, $30, Google Hangouts
• Sunday, December 3, 2-4 pm, ET, $30, Google Hangouts

How to Register

Send an email to barbarakrasner(at)att(dot)net to register. Payment can be made by check or PayPal after registration.

Registration deadlines:

• Setting and Achieving Your Writing Goals, September 3
• Sending Out Your Literary Offerings, August 21
• Writing in Real Time, September 24 (for October session), October 29 (for November session), November 26 (for December session)

Literary Offerings into the World | July 2017 Report

Poetry: 2 submissions (Penn Review, BOATT Journal), 1 acceptance (Kelsey Review), 3 rejections (The Literary Review, Rattle, Penn Review). This last rejection was personal!

Fiction: 0 submissions, 0 acceptances, 0 rejections. Fiction has taken a backseat for the moment.

Creative Nonfiction: 6 submissions (Penn Review, Pleiades, Minerva Rising, Creative Nonfiction, The Fourth River, Hippocampus), 0 acceptances, 5 rejections (Penn Review, Missouri Review, Paris Review, Origins, Images) but 2 of them personal. I revised another essay and am signed up for two online essay/memoir classes in the fall. I also completed the first full draft of my YA biography during Camp Nanowrimo. Now I just have to work on the image file and, of course, revisions!

Other July 2017 activities: I completed an article and activities for a Scholastic magazine, a new client for me, and I’ve begun research on a new work-for-hire assignment for an educational publisher. I also drafted a new article for Cobblestone. I continue to teach The Whole Megillah online fiction classes and work with picture book biography authors to develop their manuscripts. I think I’ve completed a new poetry chapbook. More on that in the fall as well as info on new The Whole Megillah online classes.

Coming up in August 2017: Workshopping a Holocaust-related middle-grade novel in verse at the Jewish Children’s Literature Tent Program at the National Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts and the YA biography at Carolyn P. Yoder’s Alumni Retreat at the Highlights Foundation in Pennsylvania.

Central New Jersey Opportunity!
If anyone lives in the central Jersey area and would like to be part of a group where we write to timed prompts using the Amherst Writers & Authors method (I’m a trained facilitator), please let me know!

2017 Year of the Book | Second Quarter Progress Report

I pledged 2017 as the Year of the Book. my year to sell a book manuscript. Now that the second quarter of the year has closed, here is my progress report:

Poetry: My poetry chapbook, Chicken Fat, is available for pre-sale until August 18 from Finishing Line Press. We anticipate October release and I have two book readings lined up in northern and central New Jersey.

Creative Nonfiction: Of the six essays I wrote for my online class from Creative Nonfiction magazine, three relate to my genealogical memoir in progress. I’ll be taking another course in the fall and working on it some more. I also just applied for a 2018 writing residency.

I used Camp Nanowrimo, the July event patterned after the popular November National November Writing Month (Nanowrimo) to draft another narrative nonfiction project for young adults. I have an opportunity next month to work directly with an interested editor for a week.

Picture Books: I just revised two picture book biographies and will take those with me to the National Yiddish Book Center’s Tent Program for Jewish Children’s Literature (one of twenty authors selected to participate) next month. Even though I’m workshopping middle grade (see below), it might be a great place to get some feedback on these two other manuscripts.

Novel in Verse: I will be workshopping my middle-grade work in progress next month in Amherst, MA at the Tent Program. My agent is interested in seeing it. I hope to make any necessary revisions before the end of Labor Day weekend to get it to her. I already have an editor interested.

Fiction: I have a YA Holocaust novella and a YA immigrant novel that await revision and I’d like to use Nanowrimo in November to draft two chapter books of Jewish content, one historical and one contemporary. The Tent Program may also give me the opportunity to learn more about chapter books.

Other projects: I have a middle-grade biography that need revision.  I continue to write books for hire for educational publishers and my university asked me to contribute several short biographies about legendary people of Paterson, New Jersey for a collection it’s publishing, a joint venture of the English and History departments.

Question 4U: How is your Year of the Book coming along? Please share!

Literary Offerings into the World | June 2017 Report

Pretty much a month of rejections…

Poetry: 0 submissions, 0 acceptances, 1 rejection (Foundry).

Fiction: 0 submissions, 0 acceptances, 0 rejections.

Creative Nonfiction: 1 submission (Passager), 1 acceptance (Jewish Literary Journal), 7 rejections (Lascaux Review, J Journal, Front Porch, Agni, Malahat Review, Salmagundi, New England Review), but I am still hopeful! I’m about to begin revisions on another piece and signed up for a four-week Iota Conference online course for the fall.

Other June 2017 activities: I attended the Highlights Foundation Novels in Verse Workshop, presented and launched new website and database Holocaustkidlit.com at the annual Association of Jewish Libraries conference in New York City. Also completed an article on James Fenimore Cooper for Cobblestone Magazine.

Coming up in July 2017: I joined Camp Nanowrimo to generate the first full draft of a YA biography. I already had three chapters in my book proposal, so six more to go! By July 31, I’ll have something. This month I’ll also be working on an article and activities for a Scholastic magazine, a new client for me.

Question 4U: What has your activity been like?

Now Available! Chicken Fat, a New Poetry Chapbook by Barbara Krasner

Note from Barbara: I really hope you’ll check out my book. The poems are personal. The people on the cover? My grandmother, Rose Entel Perlman, an immigrant from Poland, my mother, Lillian Perlman Krasner, and I think that’s my twin sister, Andrea, visible in the stroller. The photo was taken in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where my grandparents lived and my mother was born and raised.

To pre-order your copy, click here>>>

Chicken Fat

 

by Barbara Krasner

 

$13.99

Barbara Krasner’s collection of poems, Chicken Fat, is rich and soulful, redemptive, and full of the soothing spice that makes poetry come alive. She writes about heritage, family, the Jewish experience and identity in a way that is fresh and robust. Her poetry is warm, accessible, and utterly singular in its ability to put you right into the middle of the simmer and let you feel all the spice and ‘fat’ of the human experience. There is a love in these poems that is tangible. She has mastered the art of the ‘living language’—an ability to take very personal moments, the small intimate details of a life, and make them speak to a universal scaffold of truths that anyone can acknowledge. This book is called Chicken Fat but there is nothing excessive here, just the rich and full flavor of poetic voice that is beautifully rendered.

–Matthew Lippman, author of Salami Jew and The New Year of Yellow

In Chicken Fat, Barbara Krasner displays a gift for linking moving memories of her New Jersey Jewish childhood and life with the collective memories of her parents’ and grandparents’ history of the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe. Krasner’s narrative poems contain both directness and tenderness as she details family and personal loss as well as a tenacious endurance.  She demonstrates a rare gift of describing current and traditional Jewish food (kishka, gribenes, lungen stew) in a way that is not only tantalizes but also provides an ethnic background of this endangered cuisine.  Krasner’s Chicken Fat is a powerful book of poems that transcends her personal story and connects to her readers with a compelling immediacy.

–Laura Boss, author of The Best Lover ( New York Quarterly, 2017) and Editor, Lips

To pre-order your copy, click here>>>

 

Holocaustkidlit.com Goes Live | Online Searchable Database of Children’s Holocaust Literature

Yesterday at Hebrew Union College in New York City at the annual conference of the Association of Jewish Libraries, I announced and demonstrated the debut of Holocaustkidlit.com, a new website featuring an online searchable database of children’s Holocaust literature published in the United States and Canada from 2002 forward (excluding self-published and educational titles).

The source for the database is the Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database.

 

 

The database includes fields for the following:

• Title
• Author/illustrator
• Place, date, and name of publisher
• Age group
• Genre
• Geographic scope
• Holocaust category (e.g., occupation, flight, resistance, Jewish resistance, concentration camps, recovery, return)

The database also includes a synopsis, Sydney Taylor and National Jewish Book awards, and links to online reviews.

Who can benefit from this site?

The site and database provide information that can be helpful to the following audiences:

• Educators
• Librarians
• Editors/Publishers
• Students
• Writers/authors
• Scholars

The site can be used to understand, for example, how many and which books have been published for children that deal with China or the number and which titles deal with concentration camps. But the site can also be used to produce data on publishing trends. For instance, 2009 was a banner year, perhaps inspired by the commemoration of Kristallnacht. Other patterns at a simplistic level include the takeover of teen/YA as a genre over older readers since 2010 and the domination of Germany, Poland, and the United States as the settings. There is opportunity, too, to ramp up the publication of titles dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust.

I invite all of you to check out the website and let me know your thoughts through the comment section.