Indigo's work is sense-embedded, peeled
to perceptive freshness,
with a gift for the muscular
and concentrating phrase.
-Jane Hirshfield
These are poems that ache and tremble with urgency.
-Natasha Trethewey (2007 Pulitzer Prize)
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Indigo Moor is a multi-genre, award-winning writer and teacher. His second book of poetry, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won the Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem prize. His first book ,Tap-Root, was published as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. His stageplay, Live! at the Excelsior, was a finalist for the Images Theatre Playwright Award.
Indigo is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program—where he studied poetry, fiction, and scriptwriting—and a graduate member of the Artist's Residency Institute for Teaching Artists.
Former vice president of the Sacramentor Poetry Center, Indigo has served as editor for the Tule Review and the Lily Lit Review as well as judge for the SPC Book Contest.
In addition to his work as a physical design engineer, Indigo has spent the last seven years lecturing and teaching creative writing workshops at conferences, residencies and universities across the country.
A musician and photographer, Indigo's collaborations include the Artists Embassy International Dancing Poetry Festival, the Livermore Ekphrastic Project, and the Davis Jazz Arts Festival.
Awards
Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize; Images Theatre New Voices Award Finalist; Indiana University's Vesle Fenstermaker Prize for Emerging Writers; a Pushcart Prize nominee; Jack Kerouac Poetry contest winner.
Finalist for: the T.S. Eliot Prize, Crab Orchard First Book Prize, Saturnalia First Book Award, Naomi Long Madgett Book Award, and WordWorks Prize.
Interviews & Feature Stories
Tap-Root
Through the
Stonecutter's Window
Main Street Rag Press
Editor's Select
Poetry Series
Northwestern University Press
Cave Canem Prize
for a Second Book
Under Construction
In 1999, Stephen King began to write about his craft -- and his life. By midyear, a widely reported accident jeopardized the survival of both. And in his months of recovery, the link between writing and living became more crucial than ever.
Rarely has a book on writing been so clear, so useful, and so revealing. On Writing begins with a mesmerizing account of King's childhood and his uncannily early focus on writing to tell a story. A series of vivid memories from adolescence, college, and the struggling years that led up to his first novel, Carrie, will afford readers a fresh and often very funny perspective on the formation of a writer. King next turns to the basic tools of his trade -- how to sharpen and multiply them through use, and how the writer must always have them close at hand. He takes the reader through crucial aspects of the writer's art and life, offering practical and inspiring advice on everything from plot and character development to work habits and rejection.
Serialized in the New Yorker to vivid acclaim, On Writing culminates with a profoundly moving account of how King's overwhelming need to write spurred him toward recovery, and brought him back to his life.
Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower -- and entertain -- everyone who reads it.
Excerpt
Still no Pulitzer winner, and quite a bit longer than Hello, ex-wife, but it’s not all about speed, as I’ve already tried to point out. And if you think it’s all about information, you ought to give up fiction and get a job writing instruction manuals—Dilbert’s cubicle awaits.
You’ve probably heard the phrase in medias res, which means “into the midst of things.” This technique is an ancient and honorable one, but I don’t like it. In medias res necessitates flashbacks, which strike me as boring and sort of corny. They always make me think of those movies from the forties and fifties where the picture gets all swimmy, the
voices get all echoey, and suddenly it’s sixteen months ago and the mud-splashed convict we just saw trying to outrun the bloodhounds is an up-and-coming young lawyer who hasn’t yet been framed for the murder of the crooked police chief.
As a reader, I’m a lot more interested in what’s going to happen than what already did. Yes, there are brilliant novels that run counter to this preference (or maybe it’s a prejudice)—Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, for one; A Dark-Adapted Eye, by Barbara Vine, for another—but I like to start
at square one, dead even with the writer. I’m an A-to-Z man; serve me the appetizer first and give me dessert if I eat my
veggies.
Invisible Cities consists of a series of dialogues between Marco Polo, the famous Venetian traveler, and Kublai Khan, the legendary conqueror. The two sit in Kublai Khan’s garden, and Marco Polo recounts, or perhaps invents, descriptions of a multitude of fabulous cities. Since these cities are never actually seen, but only described, they are invisible to the emperor; since they might not even exist, they may be literally unknown to everyone but the reader, who is entranced by the shimmering, haunting evocations of Marco Polo/Italo Calvino.
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Trading Cities 4
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationdhip of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.
From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
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If Jean Toomer had written his landmark Cane in 2007 instead of 1923, it might well have looked something like Indigo Moor´s vivid and soulful Tap-Root . This latest installation in Main Street Rag´s Editor´s Selected Poetry Series rings with echoes of the vibrant imagery, personalities and music that made Toomer´s work memorable.
-JoSelle Vanderhooft
Pedestal Magazine
