Please join us for a poetry reading with Harriet Levin and E. Ethelbert Miller!
In My Oceanography Levin plunges into psychic depths to confront desire, fear and loss. These poems expand borders as her language strives toward transcendence. The life and work of post-minimalist sculptor Eva Hesse serves as a starting point, yet these poems extend far beyond ekphrasis in their imaginative renderings of Hesse's life against the demands of her art. In exploring the persona's struggle to create art, Levin's poems engage the reader and connect us to the demands of work, marriage and the everyday.
Prize winning poet and novelist Harriet Levin has been combining her writing with activism for over twenty years. The author of the newly released poetry book, My Oceanography, her two previous collections include The Christmas Show (chosen by Eavan Boland for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award) and Girl in Cap and Gown (a National Poetry Series Finalist). Her debut novel, How Fast Can You Run, a Novel Based on the Life of Lost Boy of Sudan Michael Majok Kuch came out of a One Book, One Philadelphia writing project she founded with her family and students to help reunite several Lost Boys of Sudan with their mothers living abroad. She has written for The Forward, PEN America, The Smart Set, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares and other journals. She holds a MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing and directs The Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing at Drexel University.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He is the author of several collections of poetry and two memoirs. For fourteen years he has been the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine published in the United States. Miller has been a Fulbright Senior Specialist Program Fellow to Israel in 2004 and 2012. He has taught at several universities and currently serves on the faculty at the University of Houston/Victoria. Miller’s poetry has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, Hungarian, Chinese, Farsi, Norwegian, Tamil and Arabic.
Miller is host of the weekly morning radio show On the Margin which airs on WPFW-FM 89.3 and the host and producer of The Scholars on UDC-TV. On April 19, 2015, he was inducted into the Washington DC Hall of Fame. In 2016, Miller received the AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature and the DC Mayor's Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, published in 2016 by Willow Books, is a comprehensive collection that represents over 40 years of his career as a poet. Miller’s most recent book is If God Invented Baseball, published by City Point Press.