Cole Swensen leads a Close Reading of H.D.

On Friday, November 5th, 2021, Cole Swensen led a group reading-through of a trio of poems from Sea Garden: by H.D.: Sea Rose, Sea Poppies and Evening, followed by a short reading of her own work.

Cole Swensen is the author of eighteen collections of poetry, most recently Art in Time (NIghboat 2021), On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train (Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University.

Pierre Joris leads a Close Reading of Paul Celan

On Friday, October 22nd, 2021, Pierre Joris led a group reading-through of Paul Celan’s “Line the Word Caves” and “Deathfugue” followed by a short reading of his own work.

Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for some 55 years now, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations and anthologies — most recently Fox-trails, -tales & -trots (poems & proses, Black Fountain Press); the translations Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG) & Microliths: Posthumous Prose of Paul Celan (Contra Mundum Press). In 2020 he also published A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (co-edited with Peter Cockelbergh & Joel Newberger, CMP), & earlier: Arabia (not so) Deserta (Essays, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2019), Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis (CMP 2018), and The Book of U (poems, with Nicole Peyrafitte, Editions Simoncini 2017). When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte.

M. NourbeSe Philip leads a Close Reading of Kamau Brathwaite

On Friday, October 9th, 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip led a group reading-through of Kamau Brathwaite’s “Bermudas” followed by a short reading of her own work.

Born in Tobago, M. NourbeSe Philip is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and independent scholar who lives in the space-time of Toronto where she practiced law for seven years before becoming a writer. Among her published works are the seminal She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks; the speculative prose poem Looking for Livingston: An Odyssey of Silence; the young adult novel, Harriet’s Daughter; the play, "Coups and Calypsos," and four collections of essays, including her most recent, BlanK. Her book-length poem, Zong!, is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery. Among her awards are the prestigious Chalmers Award, the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Casa de las Americas Prize, the Lawrence Foundation Prize, the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award and Dora Award finalist. Her fellowships include Guggenheim, McDowell, and Rockefeller (Bellagio). She is an awardee of both the YWCA Woman of Distinction (Arts) and the Elizabeth Fry Rebels for a Cause awards. She is the 2020 recipient of PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

Juliana Spahr leads a Close Reading of Bernadette Mayer

On Friday, September 24th, 2021, Juliana Spahr led a group reading-through of Bernadette Mayer’s “How to Keep Going in Antarctica” followed by a short reading of her own work.

Juliana Spahr's most recent book of poetry is That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions).

Harryette Mullen leads a Close Reading of Marilyn Chin’s

On Friday, September 10th, 2021, Harryette Mullen led a group reading-through of Marilyn Chin’s“Rhapsody in Plain Yellow” followed by a short reading of her own work.

Harryette Mullen’s poems, short stories, and essays are published widely and reprinted in over one hundred anthologies, including several published by Norton, Oxford, Cambridge, and Penguin presses. Her work appears in Best of Callaloo and was selected four times for the Best American Poetry anthology series edited by David Lehman with guest editors A.R. Ammons, Robert Hass, Terrance Hayes, and Robert Pinsky. She is a recipient of a Stephen Henderson Award, Academy of American Artist Fellowship, Jackson Poetry Prize, United States Artist Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Artist Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts, Helene Wurlitzer Fellowship, Dobie Paisano Fellowship, Katherine Newman Award for Best Essay on Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Polish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, and Kyrgyz. Her poetry collections include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of her essays and interviews, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, was published in 2012 by University of Alabama Press, and received an Elizabeth Agee Prize. Her poetry collection, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, was published by Graywolf Press in 2013. A new work is featured on a "Time Lost" podcast from Perdu in Amsterdam. She teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA.

Edwin Torres leads a Close Reading of Juliana Spahr

Friday, May 28th, 2021, Edwin Torres led a group reading-through of Juliana Spahr’s “Turnt” followed by a short reading of her own work.

Edwin Torres (Nuyoricua, USA) is a lingualisualist poet, rooted in the languages of sight and sound. He is the author of eleven books of poetry including The Animal's Perception of Earth (Doublecross Press, forthcoming), Xoeteox: the infinite word object (Wave Books), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos Books), and editor of the inter-genre anthology, The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press). He has improvised with many artists and performed his multi-disciplinary bodylingo poetics worldwide. His audio work is at PennSound, Ubuweb Sound, and his CD Holy Kid (Kill Rock Stars) was part of the exhibition The Last American Century Pt. II at The Whitney Museum. He has received fellowships from The Foundation for Contemporary Art, NYFA, The DIA Arts Foundation, and The Poetry Fund, among others. He has taught his process-oriented workshop, Brainlingo: Writing The Voice of The Body for many years and his work is included in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. 

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Shane McCrae leads a Close Reading of Anthony Hecht

On Friday, May 21st, 2021, Shane McCrae led a group reading-through of Anthony Hecht’s “A Deep Breath at Dawn” (click to read poem) along with a look at Bill Coyle’s “Aubade”followed by a short reading of his own work.

Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School. McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule (2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Gilded Auction Block (2019). His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. McCrae’s attention to both meter and its breakage in his poems emphasizes the chafe of historical accounting against contemporary slippage, engaging this country’s troubling history and continuation of oppression and violence. McCrae lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

giovanni singleton leads a Close Reading of concrete poems

On Friday, May 14th, 2021, giovanni singleton led a group reading-through of a group of concrete poems that foreground or engage with the letter “O” followed by a sort reading of her own work.

giovanni singleton is the author of Ascension, informed by the life and work of Alice Coltrane, which won the California Book Award Gold Medal and AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper, a collection of visual art and poetry. Her writing has been widely anthologized as well as exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum, San Francisco’s first Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In 2018, she received the African American Literature and Culture Society’s Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry. She is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. For ten years she coordinated the Lunch Poems reading series at the University of California, Berkeley where she also served as the Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics. singleton was recently awarded an inaugural 2020 c3:Initiative letterpress residency. Her dreamography is forthcoming from Noemi Press.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Carl Phillips leads a Close Reading of Jean Valentine

On Friday, April 30th, 2021, Carl Phillips led a group reading-through of Jean Valentine’s “The River at Wolf” followed by a short reading of his own work.

Carl Phillips is the author of 15 books of poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) and Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other honors include the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written two prose books: The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Eléna Rivera leads a Close Reading of Barbara Guest

On Friday, April 16th, 2021, Eléna Rivera led a group reading-through of Barbara Guest’s ““Dissonance Royal Traveller” followed by a short reading of her own work.

Eléna Rivera was born in Mexico City and raised in Paris, France. Her new book of poems, Epic Series, is just out from Shearsman Books. Her third  full-length collection of poetry Scaffolding (2017) was published by Princeton  University Press. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature  Fellowship in Translation and was a recent recipient of fellowships from  MacDowell (2020), Trelex Paris Poetry Residency (2019), Tamaas (2016)  and the SHOEN Foundation (2016). Her translation of Isabelle Baladine Howald’s Phantomb is forthcoming from Black Square Editions.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Mónica de la Torre Leads a Close Reading of Cesar Vallejo

On Friday, April 2nd, 2021, Mónica de la Torre led a group reading-through of Cesar Vallejo's "XXXVI" from Trilce, as translated by Clayton Eshelman followed by a short reading of her own work.

Poet, translator, and scholar Mónica de la Torre was born and raised in Mexico City. She earned a BA from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and, with the support of a Fulbright scholarship, relocated to New York in 1993 to pursue an MFA and a PhD in Spanish literature at Columbia University. Her full-length poetry collections include Public Domain (2008), Talk Shows (2007). She has also published the chapbooks Four (Switchback) and The Happy End (Song Cave). With artist Terence Gower, she co-authored the art book Appendices, Illustrations and Notes (1999). De la Torre coedited, with Michael Wiegers, the bilingual anthology Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (2002). Her translations from Spanish include Lila Zemborain’s Mauve Sea-Orchids (2007, co-translated with Rosa Alcalá) and Poems by Gerardo Deniz (2000), which she also edited. De la Torre’s honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has edited BOMB Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Brooklyn

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.