About this Poetry Community

This is an online community website that is targeted at poets as well as others who enjoy the written word or have similar interests. This is a feature that Word Salad Poetry Magazine is sponsoring, along with Future Wave Web Development and Web Design, the hosting and web development company that supports this community.

As this site grows we will be setting up community areas focused on topics or categories that we think will be of interest to those for whom the site is being developed. We will have online writer's/poet's workshop areas - in the forums. We will have forums for discussion of a variety of other topics. We will have articles and columns that address a variety of topics. Hopefully much of this will be educational, interesting and informative.

We will also feature recommendations, suggestions and resources.  We will also provide links to related sites and announcements of information that may be of interest.

Why Join Our Community?

We are interested in a growing community of creative persons, persons with some interest in poetry.  As a member of this community, you will have access to a variety of features and most importantly, you can help shape this community into something  you would want to see or experience.  Perhaps one of a few different things have brought you here.  Perhaps you are interested in workshop experiences with others.  Perhaps you are interested in learning about places to get published.  Perhaps you are interested in poetry contests.  You have a variety of options here.  You can subscribe to our RSS newsfeed and learn about any new content that we post here.  You can join the community and visit on a regular basis.  You can even submit web links, articles and participate in our forums.

Registration takes only seconds.  You will receive an email that will request that you confirm your request to join our community.  Click on that email and that is it!  You are a part of this community.

This site was begun by Bruce Whealton, co-editor and publisher of Word Salad Poetry Magazine.  Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs - a company providing web development and web design services.

"The Birds of Djakarta"

St. Andrews College Press of Laurinburg has just released The Birds of Djakarta, a new collection of poems by Wilmington author Jean Jones ($10). The title poem includes an oblique reference to the author's Indonesian ancestry.

Read the review of this book on the website for the Wilmington Star News (Wilmington, NC).

A longtime Wilmington resident, Jones graduated from the University of North Carolina Wilmington (where he won the book award in what was then the Creative Writing Program) and went on to earn an MFA from Bowling Green State University.

As Ryan David Miller writes in the book's introduction, "He knows everyone, has been published in stacks upon stacks of local and non-local publications and is always putting something together or talking about poetry ..." Jones has been long associated with the online poetry zine Word Salad, and his work has appeared in St. Andrews Review, Pembroke Magazine, Kansas Quarterly, fuse magazine, Beautiful Nuance (which awarded the title poem its LizaBeth Poetry Award), King David, Decompositions and Quill & Ink, to give a partial list. His previous anthologies include Beyond Good and Evil.

Jones is co-host (with Scott Urban) of the monthly writing workshop for the Wilmington Writers Forum at Bottega Gallery downtown. The next session is 7 p.m. Thursday, July 10, in the gallery at 208 N. Front St. For details, call 763-3737.

Copies of The Birds of Djakarta are available at Pomegranate Books and Two Sisters Bookery.