S114. Conflict, Crisis, Verse: Four Poets in Conversation

Florida Salon 5, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Saturday, March 10, 2018
9:00 am to 10:15 am

 

During a period of political exigency and social anxiety, how can poets and poetry teach, inspire, connect, and heal? Four widely published and celebrated poets—two military combat veterans, an Iraqi-American emigre, and the spouse of a military officer—draw on the urgency and insight born of their experience of war to trace the dynamic relationship of poetic voice and technique, personal circumstance and perspective, and turbulent national and global events.


Participants

Moderator:

Peter Molin teaches in the writing program at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He publishes and presents often on contemporary war literature, 19th-century American literature, and composition studies, and blogs at Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of six poetry collections, including most recently Dots & Dashes, The Arranged Marriage, and Red Army Red. She is as an associate professor at the University of North Texas.

Dunya Mikhail was awarded the Kresge Fellowship in 2013 and the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing in 2001. Her books include The War Works Hard, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, The Iraq Nights, and the newly released The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq.

Benjamin Busch served as an infantry and light armored reconnaissance officer in the United States Marine Corps, deploying twice to Iraq. He is the author of a memoir, Dust to Dust, and has published in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Five Points, and North American Review.

Brian Turner (author of My Life as a Foreign Country; Here, Bullet; and Phantom Noise) received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a USA Fellowship, an NEA grant, the Amy Lowell, the Poets’ Prize, and a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He directs the MFA in creative writing at Sierra Nevada College.

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