JeFF Stumpo, Author

Appropriately enough for National Poetry Month, April is going to be a month of me digging in and getting out.

I’m doing a residency at the Vermont Studio Center from April 6 through May 1 (and need this coming weekend to get ready). My primary intended goal is to edit the hip hop manuscript with fresh and incoming feedback, but I also have the very beginnings of a book-length manuscript started and which I will probably work on some, plus a chapbook I unexpectedly wandered into and for which I currently have “complete” drafts of eight out of perhaps twenty poems. Given that the residency will let me just drill down into poetry for as much as I can, I expect that whenever my mind wears itself out working on one of these things, I’ll shift to another as a means of taking a break.

Also, on April 17-18, I’ll be at the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival at the University of New Hampshire. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, my collection these are the waterfalls in my head won the 2026 Granite State Poetry Prize, and the book releases at the festival. I’ll be one of the headline readers along with Cornelius Eady and Diannely Antigua that Friday at 7pm (see my Live page for all upcoming readings and engagements), and I’m leading a workshop on Saturday.