Review: Melanie Henderson’s ELEGIES for NEW YORK AVENUE by Joseph Ross January 18, 2012

Melanie Henderson’s new book, Elegies for New York Avenue turns remembering into a fine art. Winner of the 2011 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, the poems in this book are moving, generous tributes to the human skill of remembering. New York Avenue, like many places in Washington, D.C. is at once changing, and at the same time rooted in the past. Melanie Henderson’s poems capture all of that– the sadness and hope that come with change, as well as the mixed goodness of the past.

Melanie Henderson’s poems are multi-layered and beautiful. They are accessible but not simple. Read more…

Elegies for New York Avenue Book Launch at Sunday Kind of Love, 1/15/12, 5-7pm December 20, 2011

Review of Elegies for New York Avenue @ The Big Ideas by Brian Gilmore December 6, 2011

Everyone who grew up in Washington D.C. (myself included) seems to live near one of the avenues named after a U.S. state. For me, it was South Dakota Avenue, a residential thoroughfare of schools, libraries, gas stations, and single family homes, of little significance, except our mischief.  Washington D.C. poet, Melanie Henderson salutes her avenue in her debut collection of poetry, “Elegies for New York Avenue.” (Read more…)

A Poet of the City: LWL Profiles Melanie Henderson September 16, 2011

 

There is a quiet intelligence to Melanie Henderson. You can see it in her large, brown eyes when she fixes you in her gaze. There’s an intensity, too, in her quick speech that feels like part nervous energy, part passion. It’s softened by the sound of her voice, which registers perhaps a decibel or two below average. It’s a quality that makes you want to listen, to lean in a little so that you catch every word. Read more…

PRE-Order Information: ELEGIES for New York Avenue by Melanie Henderson August 31, 2011

ELEGIES for New York Avenue

poems by

Melanie Henderson

ISBN: 978-1-59948-330-6, ~96 pages

Cover/List price: $14 (Only $12 if purchased from the MSR Online Bookstore)

The Advance Discount price of $9 will be available until October 8, 2011. Projected release date: November 27, 2011.

* * * WINNER of the 2011 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award * * *

 

 

COMMENTS

Melanie Henderson’s verse in Elegies for New York Avenue is the blessed sound of the street and stoops of Washington D.C., the lives of the special people on the porches and parlors, the unseen, but the people who are the world, and are the city that is loved so well here. Her first collection of word is more than a triumph; it is one long magical song that showcases a poet with a big heart and an even bigger literary vision that heals and holds up together.

—Brian Gilmore

“Delicious in their sheer sonic energy, the poems in Elegies for New York Avenue take us on a headlong, heady rush through story and memory, portrait and lyric, lament and celebration, every line sounding the way for another, linking again and again to a surprising intimacy and reality. The mosaic of neighborhood and family that Henderson creates is spellbinding. Each piece, each person, each emotion is emblazoned in these poems by precise words and honored by an attention both tender and fierce. These poems throw off sparks. Catch them!”

—Joan Houlihan

In her debut collection, Elegies for New York Avenue, Melanie Henderson carves out a totem of love and loss from the mercurial landscape of memory. Her elegies are lamentations for the living—childhood friends that no longer haunt the avenue, a brother mixing beats with Go-Go and hip hop heat, altars for aunties and cousins, portraits of a father slipped into the shadow of a gun and the promise of a son—that tease and trace history, worrying the present’s past in lyrical, lilting, pristine poetry. Henderson does for DC what Bearden did for Harlem. In her verse, she collages in a lost world of Black pride, struggle and integrity into a precarious present palpable as hope.

—Tony Medina

Exhibit: (Un)Lock It: the Percussive People in the Go-Go Pocket by Thomas Sayers Ellis August 5, 2011

(Un)Lock It: the Percussive People in the Go-Go Pocket by Thomas Sayers Ellis

Opening Reception, August 5th, 6-8pm

Exhibition Dates: August 5 – October 7

The Gallery at Vivid Solutions

 2208 MLK, Jr. Avenue S.E., Washington, DC 20020

(202) 365-8392

 

“Go-Go is a non-stop, vernacular dance music unique to Washington, D.C. and the Pocket is the percussive conversation between or beneath Go-Go grooves and songs. This photography project takes its title from a term “Lock It” used by the Go-Go community to describe a perfectly played (or locked) Go-Go Pocket. The goal of the Pocket is Home Rule and its anthem is “Bustin’ Loose,” Chuck Brown’s classic call for “The Bridge.” In a city as Capital as Washington, this work is a percussive attempt to reclaim the pictorial power of photography for D.C. residents, the folk who (as Walt Whitman once wrote) “do the real living and dying in this land.”"

Gypsy & the Bully Door (Capital Fringe Festival) July 20, 2011

Ocean Ana Rising Inc.

presents

Gypsy & the Bully Door

Written by Nina Angela Mercer/Directed by Eric Ruffin

 

 

 

“Sara – fortune teller & member of the “We Bomb Truth Over Lies” graffiti movement – is haunted. The City eats its residents, exiling their spirits to Sara’s apartment, while Go-Go & its Mayor BirdMan funk eternal.”

 

The Warehouse

645 New York Avenue N.W.

Washington, DC 20001

Contact: 866-811-4111

Tickets: $17

 

Showtimes:

 

Tuesday, July 12th, 10:00 pm

Thursday, July 14th, 7:45 pm

Saturday, July 16th, Noon

Tuesday, July 19th, 7:45 pm

Friday, July 22nd, 6:00 pm

Elegies for New York Avenue, Winner of 2011 MSR Poetry Book Award! May 6, 2011

2011 WINNERS’ LIST

 

Winner: Elegies for New York Avenue by Melanie Henderson of Washington, DC.
Finalists/Runners up (in alphabetical order):

Banjo String Theoryby Lynn Pattison, Kalamazoo, MI
Devil’s Messengers by David Allen Sullivan, Santa Cruz, CA
Dopplegangster by Patrick Moran, Fort Atkinson, WI
Heinz 56 by Amanda Reynolds, Pittsburgh, PA
Silver by Jason McCall, Tuscaloosa, AL
System of Hideouts by Heather McNaughter, Pittsburgh, PA
Zero is the Whole I Fall into at Night by Becky Thompson, Jamaica Plain, MA

Learn more about Main Street Rag.

[American Journal] by Robert Hayden May 2, 2011

here among them     the americans     this baffling
multi people     extremes and variegations     their
noise     restlessness     their almost frightening
energy     how best describe these aliens in my
reports to The Counselors

disguise myself in order to study them unobserved
adapting their varied pigmentations     white black
red brown yellow     the imprecise and strangering
distinctions by which they live     by which they
justify their cruelties to one another

Read more…

Excerpt courtesy of Poets.org

Where I’ll Be at AWP: TORCH City Series, 2/5/11, 5 pm January 30, 2011

Thurgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage, 1816 12th Street N.W., Washington, DC 20009, Saturday, February 5 · 5:00pm – 6:30pm

Join us for an intimate reading featuring TORCH: poetry, prose, and short stories by African American Women contributors Venus Thrash, Evie Shockley, Melanie Henderson, and Tara Betts hosted by Randall Horton. TORCH is an online journal published by Torch Literary Arts.