Pho-toems: Nance Van Winckel

Nance Van Winckel is on a roll. Two new books are coming next year (poems and stories). But much of her attention these days is focused on her pho-toems, collage art or off-the-page poems, if you will, or combinations of poetry, found and altered poetry, graffiti, ads, signage, and, well, walls. Photos and poems. Here’s what she wrote when she sent them: “So I thought I’d send you a couple of these altered ads, things I’m doing now for, Numéro Cinq. After I alter the text of the ads, it seems to me they need some place to live, so I stick ’em on walls.” Nance makes it sound easyand casual, but the images themselves are spectacular, surprising, expansive, witty and charged with a mysterious interaction of language and space. NC has published earlier pho-toems and a short pho-toem video. And here also is an interview about pho-toems Nance did with Diane Lockward.

—Nance Van Winckel

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Nance Van Winckel will have two new books out in 2013. Pacific Walkers, her sixth collection of poems, is due out from U. of Washington Press, and Boneland, her fourth book of linked stories, will appear with U. of Oklahoma Press. She is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships, an Isherwood Fiction Fellowship and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. New poems appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review. She has new short fiction in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, and Kenyon Review. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Her primary interest lately is Poetry-Off-the-Page, and she has had work in several juried art shows of her “pho-toems” (photo-collage with text). A solo show of this work opened in January at the Robert Graves Gallery in Wenatchee, Washington; examples may be viewed at:  http://photoemsbynancevanwinckel.zenfolio.com/