Boston Globe features poetry collection edited by James Crews (PhD '16)

This week, the Boston Globe featured the new collection of poetry How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, edited by English alumnus James Crews. In an interview titled “‘The mission is joy’ for editor of new all-star poetry collection,” Globe correspondent Michael Kleber-Diggs talks with James Crews about joy, “soul time,” and what inspired the broad-ranging anthology.

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How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, published by Workman Publishing, hit shelves on March 23, 2021. From the publisher:

More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for. How to Love the World, which contains new works by Ted Kooser, Mark Nepo, and Jane Hirshfield, invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere. With pauses for stillness and invitations for writing and reflection throughout, as well as reading group questions and topics for discussion in the back, this book can be used to facilitate discussion in a classroom or in any group setting.

James Crews earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he specialized in creative writing (poetry). His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review, The New Republic, and The Sun, as well as on Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column, and he is a regular contributor to The London Times Literary Supplement. The author of two collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays (Prairie Schooner Prize and Foreword Book of the Year Citation, 2011) and Telling My Father (Cowles Prize, 2017), Crews is also co-editor of several anthologies of poetry. He leads Mindfulness & Writing workshops and retreats throughout the country and works as a writing coach with groups and individuals. He lives with his husband, Brad Peacock, in Shaftsbury, Vermont.