Join us for an evening of exceptional poetry with Voices of Poetry (VOP). VOP organizes poetry readings featuring a diverse array of accomplished poets and writers at venues throughout New England and New York. Neil Silberblatt is also the host & administrator of the Voices of Poetry group on Facebook, which (at last count) had 8000+ members.
This event will feature five acclaimed poets – Doug Anderson, Frank Bidart, Rage Hezekiah, Krysten Hill & Ellen Dore Watson.
Doug Anderson served as a combat medic in the Vietnam War. He has written about his experiences in that war in both poetry and nonfiction. He is the author of the poetry collections Horse Medicine (Barrow Street Press, 2015); The Moon Reflected Fire (Alice James Books, 1994), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police (Curbstone Books, 2000); and the memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009). His awards include a grant from the Eric Mathieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Anderson has taught at the University of Connecticut, Eastern Connecticut State University, and the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences at UMass Boston.
Frank Bidart – winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry – is one of the most acclaimed contemporary American poets. His first volume of poetry, Golden State (G. Braziller, 1973), was selected by poet Richard Howard for the Braziller Poetry series. His recent volumes include Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017), which won the National Book Award; Metaphysical Dog: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013); Watching the Spring Festival: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008); Star Dust (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005); Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books, 2002); and Desire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. He is also the co-editor of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). His honors include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review’ s first Bernard F. Conners Prize for The War of Vaslav Nijinsky in 1981. In 2007, he was awarded Yale University’s Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. Bidart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. He has taught at Wellesley College since 1972.
Rage Hezekiah earned her MFA from Emerson College. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The MacDowell Colony, and The Ragdale Foundation, and is the recipient of the St. Botolph Foundation’s Emerging Artists Award. She is the author of the chapbook, Unslakable (Paper Nautilus, 2019), and the full-length collection, Stray Harbor (Finishing Line Press, 2019).
Krysten Hill is an educator, writer, and performer who has showcased her poetry at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and Blacksmith House in Cambridge, among many other venues. She received her MFA in poetry from UMass Boston, where she currently teaches. Her work can be found in apt, Word Riot, The Baltimore Review, Muzzle, PANK, Winter Tangerine Review, Take Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award. Her chapbook, How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.
Ellen Doré Watson – former Director of The Poetry Center at Smith College – earned a BA and MFA from UMass. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky described her work in her first poetry collection, We Live in Bodies (Alice James Books, 1997), as “interrogative, tender, wildly inventive, with the wonder of childhood and a grown woman’s comic sense.” She is also the author of pray me stay eager (Alice James Books, 2018); Dogged Hearts (Tupelo Press, 2010); This Sharpening (Tupelo Press, 2006); and Ladder Music (Alice James Books, 2002), winner of Alice James Books’ 2000 New York/New England Award. Watson is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and a 1990 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant. In 1998, Library Journal named her one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century.”
The Mount is a National Historic Landmark and cultural center in the heart of the Berkshires which celebrates the intellectual, artistic, and humanitarian legacy of the writer and poet Edith Wharton.
Voices of Poetry has presented more than 200 poetry events in four states: NY, NJ, CT & MA. Those events have featured Poets Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winners/nominees – as well as those who have not (yet) published a word – and have been presented at numerous venues, including Provincetown Art Association & Museum; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT; and The Rubin Museum of Art in NYC.
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