S262. How We Need Another Soul to Cling to: Writing Love Poems in Difficult Times

D139-140, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
Saturday, March 30, 2019
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

 

When the news feels like a daily onslaught, it’s hard to believe writing a poem can matter—let alone a love poem. Here, five poets will share their own love poems and discuss how writing about love also allows them to explore everything from racism to climate change to queerness to personal grief, then offer strategies of how others might do the same. For how better to know why resistance is worth it? In this panel, we'll discuss not just what we’re fighting against but what we’re fighting for.


Participants

Moderator:

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me With You, Wherever You're Going and Pelvis with Distance, winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She serves as the Associate Editor of Beloit Poetry Journal.

Melissa Crowe is the author of the poetry collection Dear Terror, Dear Splendor. She's coeditor of Beloit Poetry Journal and coordinator of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. He teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Tim Seibles has published several collections of poetry, including Buffalo Head Solos, Fast Animal—a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award—and, most recently, One Turn Around The Sun. He is a professor of English at Old Dominion University and the current Poet Laureate of Virginia.

Meg Day is the 2015–2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level. Day is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College.

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