Mead Hall-Founders Room, at 7:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted
Friday, June 21, 2013
Brazilian poet Adélia Prado and American poet translator Ellen Doré Watson
She began writing at age 40. Much of her outlook reflects her Catholic beliefs. Many of her poems are about the body. Ellen Doré Watson has translated her poems in to English.
The free verse of Carlos Drummond de Andrade made me think:,That’s how I want to write. Reading him I realized I didn’t need rules hanging over me, I could write however I wanted. I just obey a rhythmic impulse, which is itself the very nature of poetry. And I think reading Joyce’s Ulysses opened my eyes to what you are calling free association, to the way the mind works: I say banana and I think potato; I say cup and I think eye glasses.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Jean Valentine was the State Poet of New York from 2008-2010. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass from Copper Canyon Press. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. She was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets in 2010, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2011.
Michael Waters’ ten books of poetry include Gospel Night (2011); Darling Vulgarity (2006—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize); and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001—finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize) from BOA Editions, and Bountiful (1992); The Burden Lifters (1989); and Anniversary of the Air (1985) from Carnegie Mellon UP. In 2011, Shoestring Press (UK) published Selected Poems. His co-edited volumes include Contemporary American Poetry(Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois UP, 2003). He is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation.
Jane Mead is the author of The Usable Field (Alice James, 2008), House of Poured-Out Waters (Illinois, 2001) and The Lord and the General Din of the World (Sarabande, 1996). Her poems appear regularly in literary journals such asAmerican Poetry Review, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly, The Washington Post, and the New York Times, and have been included in many anthologies, including The Body Electric (Norton), The Breadloaf Anthology of New American Poets (University of New England Press) and Poet’s Choice (Ecco). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Completion Grant from the Lannan Foundation, and a Whiting Writer’s Award.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Judith Vollmer‘s fifth book of poetry, The Water Books, was published by Autumn House Press in 2012. Her previous collection, Reactor (University of Wisconsin Press 2004), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and featured in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Her other books include The Door Open to the Fire, awarded The Cleveland State Poetry Prize in 1997 and finalist honors for the Paterson Prize; Black Butterfly (limited edition), awarded the Center for Book Arts chapbook prize in 1997; essay on Baudelaire, “The Stroll and Preparation for Departure” is included in the Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (Cambridge University Press 2006).
Alicia Ostriker has published twelve volumes of poetry, most recently The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011 and The Book of Seventy (for which she received the 2009 Jewish National Book Award), The Volcano Sequenceand No Heaven. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, and many other journals and anthologies. Twice a National Book Award finalist, she has also received awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Poetry Center, and the Paterson Poetry Center. As a critic, she is the author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the bible. Her newest prose work is For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book.
Ira Sadoff is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently True Faith (BOA Edidtions, 2012), and Barter andGrazing (Illinois UP). His Ira Sadoff Reader compiled selected poems, published essays and short stories. His work is widely anthologized, including in the Scribner Series Best Poems of 2002 and 2008, Harper American Literature, St. Martin’s Introduction to Literature, The Bedford Introduction to Literature, The Body Electric, The Paris Review Anthology,and The Bread Loaf Anthology of Poetry. He is also the author of one novel, Uncoupling, and a critical book on contemporary poetry, aesthetics and politics, History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of Culture (Iowa, 2009).He is a recipient of grants and prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and The Poetry Society of America.
Monday, June 24, 2013
Anne Marie Macari’s third book, She Heads Into The Wilderness, was published in 2008 by Autumn House Press. In 2000 she won the APR/Honickman first book prize for Ivory Cradle, chosen by Robert Creeley. She is also the author ofGloryland, published by Alice James Books. In 2005 Macari won the James Dickey Prize from Five Points Magazine, and her poems have appeared in numerous other magazines such as: The Iowa Review, The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and Field
Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010), which won the Kinereth Gensler Award, and co-translator of Carmelia Leonte’s Death Searches for You a Second Time (Red Dragonfly Press, 2003). Her poems, translations, reviews, and articles appear in The Georgia Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Arts & Letters, Mississippi Review, Connecticut Review, Absinthe, Poetry International, Pleiades, and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. In 2011, she received a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award.
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Aracelis Girmay is the author of Teeth, published by Curbstone Press in 2007, for which she was awarded a GLCA New Writers Award. Her collage-based book, changing, changing, was published by George Braziller in 2005. Girmay has been awarded writing grants from the Watson Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, & the NEA. A Cave Canem graduate & Acentos board member, she was the 2008-2009 visiting writer in Queens College’s MFA program &, for years, has facilitated arts/activism workshops with young people in the Bronx. Her new book of poems, Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Ellen Doré Watson’s most recent volume of poems is Dogged Hearts (Tupelo Press, 2010). Her other books include This Sharpening, also from Tupelo, and two from Alice James, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York award. Broken Railings was awarded the Green Lake Chapbook Award from Owl Creek Press. Individual poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, the Zoland Poetry Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She has translated a dozen books from the Brazilian Portuguese, including The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press). Watson has also co-translated contemporary Arabic language poetry with Saadi Simawe, and a second book of Prado translations is due from Tupelo in 2012.
Sean Nevin is the author of Oblivio Gate (Southern Illinois University Press) and A House That Falls (Slapering Hol Press). His honors include a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, the Alsop Review Poetry Prize, the Katherine C. Turner Academy of American Poets University Prize, and two fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and JAMA, and anthologies including Family Matters: Poems of Our Families (Bottom Dog Press), Beyond Forgetting: Prose and Poetry about Alzheimer’s (Kent State University Press) and the anthology from the Academy of American Poets, New Voices: University and College Prizes 1998-2008. His poetry and interviews have recently been featured on NPR’s nationally syndicated shows ‘The Story with Dick Gordon’ and ‘Speaking of Faith’ with Krista Tippett. He directs the MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation at Drew University.
A Celebration of Gerald Stern
Drew University and the Caspersen School’s MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation program are pleased to invite you to a celebration of Drew’s Distinguished Poet-in-Residence Gerald Stern on June 27-28.
Thursday, June 27th 1:00-2:00 p.m. Mead Hall – Core Faculty Member Judith Vollmer interviews Gerald Stern.
Friday, June 28th 1:00-3:00 p.m. – Symposium on Gerald Stern featuring Ross Gay, Alicia Ostriker, and Jim Haba.
Friday, evening, 7:30 p.m. – A Special Celebration of Reading & Music in the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts Concert Hall
Gerald Stern accompanied by Sotto Voce, Jazz Band
He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1925 and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. He is the author of 15 books of poetry, including, most recently, Save the Last Dance (Norton, 2008) andEverything is Burning (Norton, 2005), as well as This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award. Early Collected: Poems from 1965-1992 was published by W. W. Norton in the spring of 2010, and the paperback of his personal essays titled What I Can’t Bear Losing, was published in the fall of 2009 by Trinity University Press. Stern has a memoir from Trinity University Press, Stealing History, due in 2012, along with a new book of poems from W. W. Norton, In Beauty Bright. He was awarded the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets and is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is retired from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2012, Gerald Stern was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Roy Nathanson and Sotto Voce
Roy Nathanson is the leader and principal composer of the Jazz Passengers, a six piece group that he founded with Curtis Fowlkes in 1987. It has toured Europe extensively and played at major festivals throughout the world. The band has also recorded eight cds. In 1990 Roy received a Rockefeller Grant to create the music theatre work “Jazz Passengers in Egypt” which premiered at La Mama Annex.
In 2006 Roy released the acclaimed CD “Sotto Voce” based on a combination of poems, stories and music. Later that year, Roy received a Chamber Music America grant to compose a work based on his manuscript of “subway poems” premiered at Mass Moca in 2007. The CD of this work “Subway Moon” was released in spring 2009 on Enja Records. His first book of poems of the same title was also released by “Buddy’s Knife Edition” of Cologne, Germany. His “Sotto Voce” band continues to tour extensively.
Roy has scored a variety of films and three pieces by monologist David Cale. He received a “Bessie” and a “Joseph Jefferson” (Chicago) Award for the latter. He received NYFA music composition Fellowships in 1994 and 2000. He has received grants from Chamber Music America, New York Foundation for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and The Rockefeller Fund.
Roy Nathanson and Sotto Voce in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFNPem9i0Bc
Individuals needing special assistance should contact the Housing, Conferences, and Hospitality Office at 973-408-3013 at least five working days prior to the event to ensure appropriate arrangements.
Schedule subject to change without prior notification.