After making its television premiere on Independent Lens last October, BULLY was nominated for two News & Documentary Emmy Awards: Best Documentary and Outstanding Informational Programming. Huge thanks to the entire BULLY team who made this happen. Awards will be presented on September 28, 2015. Stay tuned!

As part of the Poetry Society of America’s series, In Their Own Words, the poem Hibakusha from The Cloud That Contained the Lightning is featured today! Find the poem, and a personal essay about the research and ideas behind the poem, here!

Huge thanks to poet and writer Michael Klein for this thoughtful, smart review of The Cloud That Contained the Lighting appearing on The Rumpus!

From the review: “What The Cloud That Contained the Lightning becomes – through its somewhat fragmented and compelling five-act structure (with the wonderfully compelling section titles: “Fission”, “Trinity”, “Match in One Hand”, “The Art of Surrender” and “Clean Hands”) – is a collection of mostly declarative poems that take the invention of the bomb and uses it as a way to talk about what happens to any of us when we depart the precincts of our more rational, empathetic consciousness; when we are driven (by who or what, no one seems to know), to have a family, to have love, and still somehow also be responsible for creating something that can end to human life on an apocalyptic scale.”

As part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day program, Manifest Destiny, a new poem from my collection-in-progress, was recently featured. Check it out here!

Ever wonder, ‘how did she end up writing about the bomb and Oppenheimer anyway???’ Find the answers to your questions here in a q&a on The Cloud That Contained the Lightning!

Earlier this summer, while I was in Japan, I sat down with The Wall Street Journal’s Joelle Metcalfe to talk about The Cloud That Contained the Lightning, and what inspired these poems. Read the interview on the WSJ’s blog JAPAN REAL TIME!

Due out September 15th from the University of Georgia Press, The Cloud That Contained the Lightning is now available for pre-order from Amazon here! Selected by Nikky Finney, author of Head Off & Split, as part of The National Poetry Series, Finney writes of the book: “In The Cloud That Contained the Lightning the unstable walls of the human heart meet the intimate walls of atomic energy. There is decay. There is bloom. Cynthia Lowen skillfully and fiercely tunnels into the world and mind of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, observes, magi- cally imagines, and then maps forward a critical American life. The historical dust of what intimately did and did not happen in 1945 settles alphabetically on us all. With sensual probing and stark probability Lowen and The Cloud That Contained the Lightning resurrect the questions that human beings will forever face and only clear lovely poetry can answer: What can we see from where we stand? Whose fingers clutch the ropes that could always drop the curtain? We need this graceful work.” Order your copy today!

Happy summer from beautiful Whidbey Island, where for the last two weeks I’ve been working on several writing projects thanks to William Morris Entertainment and Hedgebrook for the 2013 Women Authoring Change Fellowship, supporting women writers!

Catch up with Alex and some of the other kids and families in BULLY and find out where they are today in Anderson Cooper’s new hour-long documentary, The BULLY Effect, about the impact of the film, 1 year later after its theatrical release.