It's our honor to introduce our final faculty reader of the 2024 Poetry Festival, Afaa Weaver--
Afaa M. Weaver: B.A. University of the State of New York (1986) M.A. Brown University (1987). In 2023, Afaa received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Previously known as Michael S. Weaver, he spent fifteen years (1970- 85) in his native Baltimore as a factory worker, and served in the military (1970-73) as an Army Reservist. His sixteenth collection of poetry is A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen Press 2023). He was first faculty at Cave Canem in 1996-98, and in 1998, named its first elder.
Please visit our Eventbrite page (linked in bio) for the detailed schedules and RSVP!
The 2024 Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival
Free and open to the public, this year our festival will be from April 19 to April 21, here on campus!
We are proud to feature readings, craft talks, and generative sessions with Catherine Barnett, Haleh Liza Gafori, Marie Howe, Joanna Klink, Eugenia Leigh, Dennis Nurkse, Maya C. Popa, Afaa M. Weaver, Shelley Wong, and more.
Our capstone event on the evening of Saturday, April 20 will be a celebration of the late poet Jean Valentine, who was a beloved faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College for many years, co-hosted by Alice James Books.
For more information, please email us at slcpoetryfest@gmail.com or follow our social media pages (@slcpoetryfest), and RSVP through our Eventbrite.
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This year, D. Nurkse will also join our poetry festival as one of our faculty readers--
D. Nurkse is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently A COUNTRY OF STRANGERS (Knopf, 2022), He's the recipient of the N.E.A., the Guggenheim, Tanne, and Whiting foundations, and the Literature Award from th4 American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other venues, and has been translated into a dozen languages. He has also taught at Rikers Island, written on human rights, and served a term on the board of directors of Amnesty Internation USA.
For more information and RSVP, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio~
It's our pleasure to present Marie Howe as one of our faculty readers of the 2024 Poetry Festival--
Marie Howe: BS, University of Windsor, Canada. MFA, Columbia University. Author of four books of poetry, the most recent Magdalene (WW Norton and Company). Howe was New York State Poet Laureate from 2012-2016. She is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the poet-in-residence at The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine. She has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Bunting Institute at Radcliffe/Harvard, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, and other magazines. Her New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Norton in 2024. SLC, 1993–
Please visit our Eventbrite page (linked in bio) for more information and RSVP!
Please join us in sending our warm welcome to Haleh Liza Gafori, who will be reading and giving a craft talk at the 2024 Poetry Festival--
Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, vocalist, performance artist, poet, and educator born in New York City of Iranian descent. She grew up hearing recitations of Persian poetry and has deepened her connection to her ancestral culture through singing and translating the work of various Persian poets, most notably the poetry of the 13th-century sage and mystic Rumi.
For more information, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio~
It's our delight to introduce our next featured reader of the 2024 Poetry Festival, Shelley Wong--
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears, longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. She lives in San Francisco.
For more information, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio!
It's our delight to introduce our next featured reader of the 2024 Poetry Festival, Maya C. Popa--
Maya C. Popa is a Romanian American poet and the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W. W. Norton, 2022), as well as American Faith (Sarabande Books, 2019). The recipient of prizes from the Poetry Foundation, the Oxford Poetry Society, the Hippocrates Society in London, and the Munster Literary Centre in Cork, Ireland, she is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at New York University.
For more information on the 2024 Poetry Festival, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio.
This year, we have the honor to introduce Catherine Barnett as one of our festival's readers--
Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf); Human Hours (2018 Believer Book Award in Poetry), The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets) and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature, which honors exceptional accomplishment. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among many other places. She teaches in the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing and works as an independent editor.
For more information on the 2024 Poetry Festival, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio!
(photo credit: Farah Al Qasimi and Res.)
Introducing another reader of the 2024 Poetry Festival, Eugenia Leigh--
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), winner of the Late-Night Library's 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry selected by Arisa White, as well as a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Poems from Bianca received the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine and have appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, The Nation, Ploughshares, and the Best of the Net anthology. Her essays have appeared in TIME, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as a Poetry Editor at The Adroit Journal and as the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary, a BIPOC-focused literary journal and literary arts organization.
For more information on the 2024 Poetry Festival, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio~
We are delighted to introduce Joanna Klink, one of our readers this year--
Joanna Klink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields. She has received awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Trust of Amy Lowell, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.
For more information on the 2024 Poetry Festival, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio~
As the Spring approaches we are happy to announce the line-ups and schedules of this year's SLC Poetry Festival!
Free and open to the public, this year our festival will happen on April 19th - 21st, here on campus at Sarah Lawrence College. We are proud to feature readings, craft talks, and generative sessions with Catherine Barnett, Haleh Liza Gafori, Marie Howe, Joanna Klink, Eugenia Leigh, Dennis Nurkse, Maya C. Popa, Afaa M. Weaver, Shelley Wong, and more. Our capstone event on the evening of Saturday April 20 will be a celebration of the late poet Jean Valentine, who was a beloved faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College for many years, co-hosted by Alice James Books. Besides some of the featured readers, our faculty members Myra Goldberg and Victoria Redel will also join us during the Jean Valentine celebration event.
For detailed schedules and RSVP, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio~