Poetry Flash is celebrating its 45th anniversary with Maxine Hong Kingston, Robert Hass, Jane Hirshfield, Giovanni Singleton, Fred Marchant, and Dean Rader, on April 15, 2018, 3 p.m., at Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA.
Refreshments will be served. Tickets at a $20 to $50 sliding scale will be available at the door.
About the poets
ROBERT HASS was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He is the author of six books of poems. Among many other honors, he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his fifth book of poems Time & Materials. The Apple Trees of Olema is a new and selected poetry collection. Recent prose books include the book of essays on literature, nature, and photography What Light Can Do and A Little Book of Forms, which is roughly 400 pages and, more than just a compendium of poetic forms, is a nuanced analysis of how poetry works structurally.
JANE HIRSHFIELD has published eight books of poems, including The Beauty; Come, Thief; After; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She edited and co-translated four books of poets from the past, and she’s the author of two books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. Her books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T.S.Eliot Prize, named best books of the year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, and The 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.
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, The Fifth Book of Peace, and the book-length memoir-in-verse I Love a Broad Margin to my Life, among other works. She is also the editor of the anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, compiled from writings out of her healing, years-long healing workshop for veterans of the Vietnam War. Among her honors are the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal, Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and F. Scott Fitzgerald Award.
FRED MARCHANT has published five books of poems, including his new book, Said, Not Said; his new and selected volume House on Water, House in Air, and his first collection Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize, reissued in a 20th anniversary second edition. One of the first Marine officers to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he is the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, concentrating on Stafford’s writings as a conscientious objector from World War II. Marchant is also co-translator of From a Corner of My Yard, by the Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa, and winner of the May Sarton Award, given to poets “whose work is an inspiration to other writers.”
DEAN RADER’s second full-length book of poems is Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry. His first, Works & Days, won the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a chapbook, was named one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year by the Barnes & Noble Review, and he has recently published a collaborative book of sonnets, Suture, with the poet Simone Muench. In addition, he is editor of several recent anthologies, including 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poems and Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, which he co-edited.
GIOVANNI SINGLETON’s new book of poems is American Letters: Works On Paper. Experimental Poets of Color says, “giovanni singleton interrogates and subverts the assumption that language builds by erecting her 2-dimensional impressions of 3D structures: cubes. singleton also troubles the supposed legibility of perhaps the vanguard structure of academia: the library.” Her first collection, Ascension, informed by Tibetan Buddhism and the life and art of the musician Alice Coltrane, received the 81st California Book Award Gold Medal. The founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal devoted to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces, she has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers Conference, and Cave Canem, and she currently coordinates the Lunch Poems reading series at UC Berkeley.
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