R267. Genre-Crossing and Poetic Truth: Lyric Nonfictions, Reported Poems

Room 518, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Thursday, March 31, 2016
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

 

This panel examines the places where genres collide and inform one another. What happens when the poet takes up the memoirist's work, the reporter's notebook, the essayist's pen? What do poets learn about poetry by pushing its boundaries? By what means does documentary poetry emerge, and what can poets teach documentarians? Five skilled practitioners of both poetry and nonfiction explore the productive sites where genres overlap.


Participants

Moderator:

Tess Taylor’s work has appeared in the Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, and the New Yorker. She is the on-air poetry reviewer for All Things Considered and has taught at Whittier College and UC Berkeley. Her first book is The Forage House. Her second book, Work & Days, is forthcoming.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Smith BlueSuck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and coedited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology. Her honors include an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, a California Book Award silver medal, and a fellowship from the NEA. She is a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

Robert Polito

Tom Sleigh's many books include Station Zed, Army Cats (John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters), and Space Walk (Kingsley Tufts Award). He is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and he works as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, and Libya.

Brian Turner (author of My Life as a Foreign CountryHere, Bullet; and Phantom Noise) received a USA Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He directs the low-residency MFA at Sierra Nevada College.

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Kansas City, Missouri

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