Maya Stein's 'Tour de Word'

Beginning September 8, with her appearance in Salem, Oregon, poet and essayist Maya Stein kicks off an intensive eight-week, 30-state traveling poetry project: Tour de Word. Financed entirely with donations through KickStarter, the project includes readings and writing workshops, as well as other events.

While getting up close and personal with those who follow her work, Stein, who is based in San Francisco, also will be collecting from project participants poems that she intends to publish in an anthology on her return. In addition, Stein plans to produce a documentary about her project, which she says she believes can be used subsequently as a learning tool for writing groups in and out of the classroom.

The video immediately below describes Stein's project:

The current itinerary for Tour de Word is here. The cross-country tour is expected to conclude November 4 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The project's Website includes almost two dozen audio files of Stein's original 10-line poems.

Stein, who has published The Overture of an Apple (a collection of essays), Spinning the Bottle (erotic-themed essays, poems, and "musings"), and Enough Water (52 10-line poems and color photographs), won the 2010 Alimentum Journal poetry contest (Stein's winning poem, "Substitutes", is featured in the summer issue of the journal) and the 2008 Blue Mountain Arts annual poetry competition (see "Someone With My Mother's Feet"). Her work and other writings appear in numerous literary publications and is included in It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure (2009) and Patti Digh's Creative is a Verb, forthcoming in November and available as a pre-order.

For five years, Stein has published her weekly "10-line Tuesday" — an original 10-line poem sent to e-mail subscribers every Tuesday. Go to 10-line Tuesday to read the poems. She writes at One Paragraph at a Time.

For Stein's other writings, including prose selections, go here.