S192. Intense/Beautiful/Devoted: Poems of Provocation & Witness

Room 301, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3
Saturday, March 1, 2014
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

 

Leonard Bernstein wrote, “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Poets today are looking without flinching at our world of drones, evictions, gun shows, and violence to the earth, as they tell the many stories of our lives. Happily, too, they are imagining alternatives and provoking change. A reading of intense and striking music, in the spirit of Split This Rock, with Patricia Smith providing opening remarks.


Participants

Moderator:

Sarah Browning is Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation & Witness. Author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden and co-editor of DC Poets Against the War, she is an Institute for Policy Studies Associate Fellow and cohosts Sunday Kind of Love at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC.

Natalie Diaz is Mojave and Pima. She was awarded 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a 2012 Lannan Residency, and a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in June 2012.

Danez Smith, a Cave Canem Fellow and two-time Pushcart Nominee, works as a Student Advisor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His recent work appears or is forthcoming in journals such as decomP, the Cortland Review, Anti-, Southern Indiana Review, and Muzzle.

Patricia Smith's six books of poetry include Blood Dazzler, National Book Award finalist, and Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah. She is featured in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. She teaches at the College of Staten Island and Sierra Nevada College.

Ping Wang has published eleven books of poetry and prose, including American Visa, Foreign Devil, Of Flesh and Spirit, New Generation, and Aching for Beauty. Recipient of NEA, Bush, Lannan, and McKnight fellowships, she founded and directs the Kinship of Rivers project.

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