William John Bert

Background I’ve been teaching myself Django by writing a web app that tracks reading series in cities: Readsr. A reading series is a kind of recurring event. It defines a time, location, and recurrence rule such as first Monday of the month. Writing a list view to display upcoming readings was easy, but I also [...]

Since March, I’ve been working with DC students from several high schools, including Duke Ellington, Ballou, Wilson and Bell, in evening poetry workshops at 826DC. A bunch of us have been helping out—Mike Scalise, Adam Pelligrini, and Sally Keith (the last two being actual poets, while Mike and I, both prose writers, were faking it [...]

Spring is the rarest of seasons in DC, but it looks like we get a few days of it this week. This could not be happening at a better time. The protracted move from Columbia Heights/Baltimore/Tucson to Capitol Hill is over. The art show has wrapped. Work is still way busy, but next week I [...]

I’m really thrilled to have a story, “Winner,” in the very first issue of Anomalous Press. It was released on the Ides of March, so I’m a bit tardy announcing it here—it’s been a busy March so far. The issue includes work from many better writers than me, including a poem and two translations from my friend [...]

If I updated more regularly, I would have written entire posts about the following things. AWP 2011 came and went blazingly fast. I saw many people I’ve missed dearly, and missed many people I would’ve liked to see. The second workshop with the Bell Poetry Club for 826DC, this time diving into the poem-as-extended-metaphor, went [...]

Friday, I helped out with an 826DC workshop at Bell Multicultural High School in Columbia Heights. Bell’s Poetry Club meets after school each Friday, and we came by to work with them on metaphor. To fuel the discussion, we read “Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo” by William Matthews (who I’d never heard of before—I’m [...]

Over the past couple weeks I worked on relaunching the website for Call + Response, an art show I co-curate with my friend Kira. The website for the second iteration of the show, Call + Response: Textures, is pretty different from the first version. The first was ultra minimal, hand-coded, and didn’t use a CMS—just [...]

I can’t stand Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, but the best part about waking up at 6:35 a.m. is his Writer’s Almanac. For five minutes he puts his cornmeal voice to good use, first to list this-day-in-literature history tidbits, then to read a poem. In this way I learned that three of my favorite [...]

Julian Barnes has been a favorite author of mine since I borrowed stole Metroland from my friend Mark last winter. Reading Barnes makes me wish I knew some French, since he drops sentences, phrases, and occasionally passages of it, sans translation, into everything he writes, or at least everything of his that I’ve read. But [...]