** Due to a last minute emergency, Carol Muske Dukes is no longer able to attend. Tammy Gomez will be presenting in her place.**
This is a virtual event and will take place on Crowdcast. Please register for FREE ahead of time to save your spot.
EVENT LINK: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/g63q07gb
In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives.
As the novel coronavirus and its devastating effects began to spread in the United States and around the world, Alice Quinn reached out to poets across the country to see if, and what, they were writing under quarantine. Moved and galvanized by the response, the onetime New Yorker poetry editor and recent former director of the Poetry Society of America began collecting the poems arriving in her inbox, assembling this various, intimate, and intricate portrait of our suddenly altered reality. In these pages, we find poets grieving for relatives they are separated from or recovering from illness themselves, attending to suddenly complicated household tasks or turning to literature for strength, considering the bravery of medical workers or working their own shifts at the hospital, and, as the Black Lives Matter movement has swept the globe, reflecting on the inequities in our society that amplify sorrow and demand our engagement. From fierce and resilient to wistful, darkly humorous, and emblematically reverent about the earth and the vulnerability of human beings in frightening times, the poems in this collection find the words to describe what can feel unspeakably difficult and strange, providing wisdom, companionship, and depths of feeling that enliven our spirits. (Knopf Publishing Group)
Alice Quinn is poetry editor of The New Yorker and the director of the Poetry Society of America.
Rex Wilder is the author of Open Late: New and Collected Poems (Chatwin Books) and Boomerangs in the Living Room and Waking Bodies (both Red Hen Press). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New Criterion, and The Harvard and Yale Reviews, as well as many anthologies — including Suzanne Lummis’s Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. As the Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, he led and organized the original “Act of the Poet” series at Chateau Marmont in Hollywood with Carol Muske-Dukes and others.
Ron Koertge is the current poet laureate of South Pasadena, CA. His most recent books are Yellow Moving Van (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Olympusville (Red Hen Press.)
Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of 9 books of poems, (the most recent, Blue Rose, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018), 4 novels & 2 essay collections. She also co-edited a poetry anthology from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux with poet Bob Holman. She is also former Poet Laureate of California. Guggenheim, NEA, National Book Award Finalist, Pushcarts. She is Professor of English/Creative Writing at USC where she founded the PhD Program in Creative Writing/Literature. The Together in Sudden Strangeness anthology is a statement in poetry about surviving Covid - providing hope.
Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California.
