The opening program of the 2021 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival features a musical performance, prelude poetry reading, and presenting poet Jenny Xie.
The Festival will take place on Hill-Stead’s expansive and picturesque West Lawn, allowing attendees to be safely socially distanced. Seating will be limited, but a livestream ticket option is also available for those who may prefer to tune in from the comfort of home.
Please bring a blanket, chairs, and a picnic if you like.
Jenny Xie was born in Hefei, China, and raised in New Jersey. She is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), which was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Eye Level received the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award and a PEN Open Book Award, and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her chapbook, Nowhere to Arrive, won the Drinking Gourd Prize, and was published by Northwestern University Press.
About Xie’s debut poetry collection, Eye Level, the former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera writes: “We go places; we enter multiple terrains of seeing; we cross cultural borders of time, voices, locations—of consciousness. Then—we notice we are in a trembling stillness with all beings and all things. Jenny Xie’s Eye Level is a timely collection of beauty, clarity, and expansive humanity.”
Xie holds degrees from Princeton University and NYU, and has received grants and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. Her work appears in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and Tin House, among other publications.
She has taught creative writing at NYU and Princeton University and currently lives in New York.
Elizabeth Metzger, winner of the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize from Tupelo Press, is the author of The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Horsethief Books, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, among others. Her prose has recently been published in Conjunctions, Literary Hub, Guernica, and Boston Review. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books. You can find more of her writing at elizabethmetzger.com.