Hello everyone!

Welcome to our PoArtMo Anthology Series, which celebrates the artists whose work appears in The Auroras & Blossoms PoArtMo Anthology: Volume 5.

Today’s guest is James Penha, who contributed beautiful haiku to our anthology. He tells us what truly inspires him to write.

My writing is, of course, shaped by work of the great poets I have read and reread. I think of Keats immediately and Whitman and Bishop and Orr and Olds and Seuss and Hewitt and… egad… so many more. But I think I am the poet I am because of my experience as an actor in my youth through which I learned to hear and speak voices not my own and strove to make words accessible and meaningful to an audience. 

And so I want the speakers of all the poems I write to be, for an audience about whom I care, recognizably human. I want my readers to hear and attend to the speakers—who may or may not be anything like me—not always to love or agree with them, but to understand them a little more with each reading of the poems.

Bio:

Expat New Yorker James Penha has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry.

Website: https://www.jamespenha.com

James, thank you for supporting Auroras & Blossoms! We know that people will love your work as much as we do!

The Auroras & Blossoms PoArtMo Anthology: Volume 5 is available! Click here to purchase your copy.

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