Andrea Carter Brown
We are so excited to start promoting and publicizing September 12 by author Andrea Carter Brown and Word Works Books.
A former resident of downtown Manhattan who lived a block from the World Trade Center on 9/11, Brown’s eyewitness account of the attack and its aftermath won the James Dickey Prize from Five Points, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, the Puddinghouse Press Chapbook Competition, The MacGuffin National Poet Hunt, and is cited in the Library of Congress Online Research Guide to the Poetry of 9/11. Featured on NPR, her poem “The Old Neighborhood” has been widely anthologized. Split This Rock chose her poem “After the Disaster: Fragments” as their Poem of the Week for the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
Poet and editor Andrea Carter Brown is the author of three previous poetry collections: The Disheveled Bed (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and two chapbooks, Brook & Rainbow (winner of the 2001 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review chapbook contest) and Domestic Karma, (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her current manuscript, American Fraktur, was chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2018 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award from Marsh Hawk Press.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, and educated at New York University, Université de Paris, and City College, she lived in New York City until 2004, where she worked as an accountant for artists and small creative businesses and was a founding editor of the poetry journal Barrow Street. She taught creative writing at Pomona College after moving to the West Coast and was Managing Editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal. For six years she served on the Fellows Council of VCCA, the last three as Chair, and edited the poetry anthology Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo with Margaret B. Ingraham. In 2017, she joined The Word Works and serves as Series Editor for The Washington Prize, their longest-running poetry book contest and imprint.
An avid birder and backyard citrus farmer, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Thomas Drescher. For more information about the genesis of September 12 in the context of her 2004 move to the West Coast, see her blog at Five Points: “On Poetry and Growing Oranges, Tangerines, Lemons, and Limes.”
September 12
The morning of 9/11, I was sitting in my apartment a block from the World Trade Center drinking coffee and reading the paper. Shortly after the North Tower was hit, I fled on foot and, by a circuitous route through Staten Island, New Jersey, and Rockland County, was reunited that night with my husband in Westchester. Four days later we returned to our apartment under armed guard to retrieve important papers. Six months later, when we were allowed to move back, there was still no phone service or transit or any stores within a mile. Tourists gawked at us as we tried to go about our lives.
That is the short story of my experience of 9/11.
But the truth is, the details of that day are indelibly etched in my memory. Many are still as vivid as they were then. Some are finding their way to the surface to this day.
These poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies, have won numerous awards, been read on NPR, and are cited in the Library of Congress Online Guide to the Poetry of 9/11.
September 12, this collection of award-winning poems about 9/11 and its aftermath, will be published in 2021 for the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Stay tuned for updates!
