A New Day Coming
January 2008

Greetings and happy new year to the friends of Soul Mountain and the members of our Soul Mountain family. Here is a year’s-beginning update, as we bid farewell to what is now history, and look ahead toward what are now only dreams.

For the first four years if its existence Soul Mountain Retreat has relied almost entirely on a generous donation from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Connecticut, made possible by Dean Ross D. MacKinnon, in a contract linked to my agreement to come out of retirement and teach half-time for those four years.
This is the last year of our contractual agreement; our connection will be severed at the end of this academic year. Soul Mountain Retreat and I, and each of the guests we have welcomed here will always be grateful to Dean MacKinnon and the University of Connecticut for their visionary generosity. And I hope we will all be Huskies fans.

Tonya Hegamin, who was my co-host here for the first three years as Program Director, left Soul Mountain in August, moving on from dreaming my dream to dreaming her own. M + O 4-EVR, one of the three books Tonya wrote here at Soul Mountain, will be published in June, 2008 by Houghton Mifflin. The second, Most Loved in All the World, will soon be released by Houghton Mifflin. The third, which we wrote together, is called Pemba’s Song: A Ghost Story, and will be published as a Y/A book by Scholastic in September, 2008.

Our fall residencies this year were co-hosted by Kelly Vass (September) and Gideon Young (October-featured on photo at right). As we try to host one “ethnic specific” residency each year, it was a great pleasure to host a group of young Native American poets in September, and to enjoy their reading at the Florence Griswold Museum. Another pleasure of the fall were the weekends for African American poets, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. They read at the Florence Griswold Museum, as well. (Click here to listen to NEA-sponsored readings.) (Click to see photos.)

I taught two classes – my last – at UConn in the Fall semester. Elizabeth Alexander and I celebrated the publication (by Wordsong) of our collaborative book, Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color in a September reading at UConn.

In October I went on an amazing trip to Russia, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, with a group of five U.S. poets, to attend the Moscow International Poetry Biennale. In January I attended an English class and gave two readings at the University Toulouse Mirail in Toulouse, France. In between I’ve had a busy schedule of readings here and there around the U.S.

Looking Ahead

I've retired from teaching and am looking forward to continuing to write and devoting more time to Soul Mountain. I am thrilled to be working with Rhonda Ward, our new Administrative Director. We will initiate a fund-raising drive in Spring, 2008, and look forward to telling you about our plans. And of course we welcome donations at any time.

Gideon Young will come back to be my co-host at Soul Mountain this spring and summer.

On July 12 Soul Mountain guest poets will read at the Florence Griswold Museum.

Some Places Where You Can Hear Me Read:

March 24 NY: “Reading Between A and B” www.readab.com/cal.html
March 30 – April 1: Goshen College
April 10: Manchester, CT, in the Mishi-maya-gat Series: www.mcc.commnet.edu/faculty/spoken.php
May 9 – 10: Ohioana Library
Or you could take the workshop I’ll be teaching July 20 – 25 at American University in
Washington, D.C. for the Hurston/Wright Foundation www.hurston-wright.org/

www.mipoesias.com/EVIESHOCKLEYISSUE/nelson_m.html

Peace.
Marilyn Nelson