Red Wheelbarrow: The Podcast and the new issue of Botticelli are online! Check them out here.
Things, as you know, got weird this spring. But over at CCAD we managed to get through it, buoyed as always by our incredible students. Usually there’s a year-end show called CHROMA, a big to-do, campus-wide. And usually our part to play is a final Red Wheelbarrow reading featuring student winners of our Creative Writing Awards and some of our outstanding seniors. When CHROMA got moved online, I had a thought: podcast. That way our students could perform their work, and better yet, it would be recorded for posterity. So we strung it together with chicken wire and duct tape and cell phones. Red Wheelbarrow: The Podcast. Despite my yammering, it holds up really well. I did interviews with the first-place winners and with my colleague Sophia Kartsonis (faculty advisor for Botticelli) and my other Writing and Literature colleagues Lesley Jenike and Josh Butts each read poems. And the student writings are so good: confident, intimate, performative in the best sense of the word, and honest.
Then there’s Botticelli, CCAD’s literary and art magazine. Usually we do a print issue in the spring, but that plan got scrambled, of course. There’s always an online version, though, so Sophia got to work with her students and put together a beautiful compelling piece of work. We’ll have the issue printed for the fall semester. This is the cover:
Head on over to the Virtual CHROMA site to give the podcast and Botticelli your time and love, and please feel free to share the link broadly.
Robert Loss 