The Poetry Society of America (PSA) and Red Hen Press present an evening of powerful art—both visual and aural—at Santa Monica’s internationally renowned ROSEGALLERY. Poets William Archila, Kim Dower, Amy Uyematsu and Fady Joudah explore life, culture, and loss in the Los Angeles landscape and beyond. With poet and PSA Programs Director Charif Shanahan as moderator.
The event is free and open to the public.
William Archila is the author of The Art of Exile (Bilingual Review Press, 2009), which won an International Latino Book Award in 2010 and was honored with an Emerging Writer Fellowship Award by The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. He has been published in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review,www.kimdowerpoetry.com.
Amy Uyematsu is a third-generation Japanese-American poet and teacher from Los Angeles. Her most recent collection is The Yellow Door (forthcoming from Red Hen Press, April 2015). She has published three previous poetry collections: 30 Miles from J-Town (Story Line Press, 1992), Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain (Story Line Press, 1997),and Stone Bow Prayer (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Her first book was awarded the 1992 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Amy was a co-editor of the widely-used UCLA Asian American Studies anthology Roots: An Asian American Reader.
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was educated at the University of Georgia, the Medical College of Georgia, and the University of Texas. Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and was a finalist for ForeWord’s Book of the Year Award. Joudah followed his second book of poetry is Alight (2013) with the ebook Textu (2013), a collection of poems written on a cell phone that are exactly 160 characters long. Joudah translated the final three collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work in The Butterfly’s Burden (2006), which won Banipal prize from the UK and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan’s Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician.
Born and raised in the Bronx, Moderator Charif Shanahan studied poetry at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and New York University, where he earned his MFA. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and a semi-finalist for the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, his poems and translations have appeared in The New Republic, A Public Space, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Circumference, The Manhattanville Review, and elsewhere. He works as Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America and as poetry editor of Psychology Tomorrow Magazine.