Evoca podcasts digital audio interviews for 2010 Pushcart Prize Nominees

PRLog (Press Release) - Mar 19, 2010 -
As an avid user of Evoca phone-to-web services to podcast her literary work online, Alice Shapiro, Atlanta-based poet and Pushcart Prize nominee (http://www.aliceshapiro.com/about.html) has partnered with Evoca to launch The Change Interviews project to enable Pushcart Prize winners and 2010 nominees to share their spoken words online (http://www.aliceshapiro.com/thechangeinterviews.html). Authors’ voices are recorded and podcast For The Change Interviews project using Evoca’s phone-to-web services.

Annually about 60 authors from dozens of presses in the independent publishing field are named Pushcart Prize winners (http://pushcartprize.com/). Outstanding works of fiction, poetry, memoirs and essays are published in the anthology The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Founding Editors of the annual anthology include Paul Bowles, Ralph Ellison, Joyce Carol Oates and Reynolds Price. Since 1976 thousands of authors have been honored by the Pushcart Press (http://www.pushcartpress.org/), recognized as one of the most influential publishers in American history. It was founded by Bill Henderson in 1972, publishing its first book in 1973, Henderson’s The Publish It Yourself Handbook. A harbinger of the contemporary self-publishing market, Henderson initially distributed his book by foot and auto.

Inspired by an author’s instinct to convey the sound of words through readings, Alice Shapiro explained “I use Evoca as a virtual Internet microphone. I can turn the world into a poetry reading stage, reaching a much broader global audience than traveling from bookstore to bookstore.” Using the phone registered to her Evoca account to make each interview recording, Shapiro asks each author to describe the impact of their association with the prestigious Pushcart Prize and to recite their poems. Upon hang-up, the interview recording is instantly saved as an MP3 recording to her Evoca account. Featured poets include Elena Karina Byrne, Bryan Borland, Alice Shapiro, Ray Sharp, Cassie Premo Steele, Lynne Thompson, Bobbie Troy, and Lorraine A. Vail.

The Change Interviews are also available online at Shapiro’s Evoca account for listening and downloading for non-commercial use (http://www.evoca.com/aliceshapiro/thechangeinterviews). Anyone interested in automatically savings new recordings to iTunes or a computer file can subscribe to The Change Interviews RSS feed (http://www.evoca.com/aliceshapiro/thechangeinterviews.rss). Author of poetry collection Cracked: Timeless Topics of Nature, Courage, and Endurance (http://bit.ly/8ZmOyM), Shapiro’s poetry readings are streamed from Evoca servers to her website http://www.aliceshapiro.com/poetryreadings.html.

Evoca CEO Murem Sharpe observes, “At a time when the publishing industry is grappling with fierce competition, disruptive technologies, and content ownership controversy, it is refreshing to simply listen to writers recite their work and talk about it. Evoca makes it possible to have this very human listening experience. The Evoca team is pleased that our easy-to-use digital media technologies have contributed to the creation and distribution of authors’ voices.”