J. Marcus Weekley - Editor

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Marcus has lived in seven states and five countries, though he prefers the movie theater or the woods. His writing has appeared in Quick Fiction, 32 Poems, Hawai'i Review, The Curator, and Poetry International, among others, and CW Books published his Singing in the Merman Cemetery, a collection of ekphrastic proems, in 2019. His work was nominated for the 2018 Best of the Net Anthology (Thank you, Inflectionist Review!) and he was a Semi-Finalist for his work in the 2009 Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize.

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     (photo credit: Lawson Jordan)

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He said this about proems:

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"I stumbled into proems by working as a Managing Editor (Hey, Lee Voss, Hey, Leslie Jill Patterson, Hey, Laurie, Hey, Andrew, Thank you, Sharon Miller! Hey, Stephen Graham Jones!) at Iron Horse Literary Review back in 2003-2005. We'd received a review copy of Ray Gonzalez's anthology, No Boundaries, and I also got Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing in Odessa. Then, I ended up in Robert Alexander's,  C. W. Truesdale's, and Mark Vinz's The Party Train and became totally addicted.

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Angela Ball had introduced a bunch of us grad students to proems in her New York School course (thanks, Angela!) in 2001, and Allison Goeller took us to Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" in 1997 (thank you, Allison!), but proems hadn't infiltrated my genes yet then.

 

What I dig about proems is their tendency to include, to gather and to sort, to build and to pare. For whatever reason, I feel freer in a proem than I do in verse or even a story. I make up the rules as I go along differently than I do in a poem, a story."

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