New Poems: A Reading

Honor Moore’s most recent book is The Bishop’s Daughter, a memoir, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year and her most recent collection of poems is Red Shoes.  Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, the American Scholar, Salmagundi, the New Republic, Freeman’s and many other journals and anthologies.  For the Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement, an Oprah summer readings pick which is featured in the current documentary about American feminism, “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.”  She has been poet in residence at Wesleyan and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and three times the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, published in 1996 and just reissued, was a New York Times Notable Book.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Beauty; Come, Thief; After; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of poets from the past and she’s the author of the essay collection, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Her books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize; they have been named best books of the year by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, and Financial Times; and they have won the California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the Donald Hall–Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf) is her new   collection of essays on how the best poems work. Her latest poetry collection, The Beauty: Poems (Knopf), uses materials sometimes familiar, sometimes unexpected, to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. Hirshfield is also a contributor to the new anthology Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (OR Books). NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015

Emmy award-winning journalist, Jeffrey Brown is the Chief Correspondent for Arts, Culture, and Society at PBS the NewsHour. He has interviewed artists and writers in addition to reporting from the field. His work has taken him all over the world, from Haiti to Myanmar as he searches for the connections between news and poetry. He is the creator and host of “Art Beat,” which is the NewsHour’s online arts and culture blog. As a producer and a correspondent, his work has earned him an Emmy, five Cine Golden Eagle Awards, and other honors. In Brown’s debut poetry collection, The News (Copper Canyon Press), he re-imagines and re-tells his experiences through poems that explore stories he’s covered, places he’s gone, people he’s met, the thrills and doubts of his profession, as well as the profound intimacy of family.

Tom Sleigh’s books of poetry include Army Cats, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Updike Award, and Space Walk, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. He is also the author of Interview with a Ghost. He teaches at Hunter College in New York. Station Zed: Poems (Graywolf Press) is the terminal outpost beyond which is the unknown. It is also the poet Tom Sleigh’s finest work. In this latest collection, Sleigh brings to these poems his experiences as a journalist on tours of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Libya. But these are also dispatches from places of grief, history, and poetic traditions as varied as Scottish ballads and the journeys of Bashō. Sleigh is a contributor to the new anthology Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (OR Books). David Mura writes of this collection, “In Extraordinary Rendition, an eclectic range of American writers break through the stereotypes and distortions of our media and provide a far more nuanced, penetrating and three-dimensional portrait of Palestinians, their history and the political realities they face daily. The range of genres and approaches make this a necessary and timely anthology, and it should be read by as large and wide-ranging an audience as possible.”