The latest issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review includes an essay by Sam Magavern about the beautiful edition of Whitman’s Live Oak, With Moss, created by the renowned illustrator Brian Selznick, with an afterword by Karen Karbiener.

Partnership for the Public Good has released a policy brief by Sam Magavern and Kevin Connor detailing the waste and corruption involved in New York state’s billion dollar subsidy for the Tesla plant in Buffalo. The brief, which has received extensive news coverage, argues that the state should make Tesla compete with other companies for the lease of this publicly-owned facility and that the state should require any company leasing the factory to meet much higher standards regarding worker rights, environmental protection, and community benefits.

On Wednesday, April 2, at 7:30pm Sam will be reading his poems as part of the Literary Café at the Center For Inquiry, 1310 Sweet Home Road, Amherst. Also reading will be Charles Case. This is the reading that was canceled in December due to weather.

On November 5, BBC’s Poetry Detective featured Whitman’s “We two boys together clinging” in a program on wedding poems. This five-minute segment (it starts at minute 18 in the program) features an interview with Sam Magavern and clips from the song version of “We two boys” by Curtis Lovell. The program is available for a few weeks on the BBC website.

Thursday, August 29 at 6pm
Buffalo History Museum
1 Museum Ct., Buffalo NY

Please join us for this special event! The film screening will begin at 6pm and will be followed by a reception with food and refreshments from Extra Extra Pizza. The event is free and open to the public, but to attend you must RSVP, using this link, by August 26.

The Montréal Review has published four poems and images from Ovid’s Creek.

Each of these short films (about 40 seconds) features a poem and work of art from Ovid’s Creek. Sam recites the poems while sitting in the woods on a warm April day.

Sam has been helping the Burchfield Penney Art Center create a new exhibition that explores parallels, contrasts, and influences in the paintings and journal entries of Charles Burchfield and the poetry and prose of Walt Whitman. As Burchfield once said, “I want to praise and exalt nature as Walt Whitman has done in Leaves of Grass.” The show runs from July 12 to October 27, 2024. Look for special events, including, on September 19, 2024, a screening and discussion with Jennifer Crandall, creator of Whitman, Alabama.

In this short essay, published in the Buffalo News, Sam reflects on driving through central New York, where so many of the place names come from the Haudensaunee or classical Greece and Rome. It took Ulysses ten years and many battles to get from Troy to Ithaca, but you can drive it in three hours and fourteen minutes. These drives became one of the starting points for the poems in Ovid’s Creek.

The Partnership for the Public Good recently published a report on which I was the lead author. How can a city that has suffered from intense depopulation, disinvestment, and segregation turn its 8,000 publicly-owned vacant lots from eyesores to assets? Titled, “Using Publicly-Owned Land to Advance Sustainability and Equity in Buffalo, New York,” this report draws on best practices from around the country in using formerly vacant lots for things like affordable housing, community gardens, and public art.

This essay, recently published in the Montréal Review, grapples with the question of what the word “truth” means in different contexts such as art, history, and philosophy. Starting with the fact that Donald Trump lied 30,573 times during his four years as president, it moves on to a wide range of examples, ranging from Charlie Parker to Mikhail Bakhtin, closing with the great speech that Nick Bottom gives after being turned into a donkey in Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Balthazar’s Journey” has been published by the Dewdrop, a journal founded and edited by Vanessa Able, a writer, editor, and Zen priest.