Sharon Springs Poetry Festival presents “Poetry and Power,” a panel discussion with Jennifer Grotz, Terrance Hayes, and Paul Muldoon. Free; no advance registration is required.
Jennifer Grotz was born in Canyon, Texas, in 1971. She received a BA from Tulane University in 1993, an MFA from Indiana University in 1996, and a PhD from the University of Houston in 2005. She is the author of Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016); The Needle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), named the 2012 Best Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters; and Cusp (Mariner Books, 2003), winner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason Poetry Prize. She is also the translator of Psalms of All My Days (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015) by Patrice de La Tour du Pin. Henri Cole writes, “I admire the solemn precision of her poems. Her mind thinking—about life and art, about landscape and love, about loneliness and loss—illuminates everything it touches.” Grotz is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently serves as the Director of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, and she teaches at the University of Rochester in New York and Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. She lives in Rochester, New York.
Terrance Hayes is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1971, and educated at Coker College where he studied painting and English and was an Academic All-American on the men’s basketball team. After receiving his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he taught in southern Japan, Columbus, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Hayes taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh before becoming a Professor of English at New York University. Hayes served as the 2017-2018 poetry editor for New York Times Magazine. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014 (Scribner, 2014), the preeminent annual anthology of contemporary American poetry. His poems have appeared in ten editions of the series. His first book, Muscular Music, won a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Time Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind In a Box (Penguin 2006), a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. How to Be Drawn received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. Lighthead, was winner of the 2010 National Book Award. His sixth poetry collection, American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the TS Eliot Prize, the Brooklyn Public Library’s Literary Prize for Fiction & Poetry, the LA Times Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. His essay collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.
Paul Muldoon is the author of fourteen major collections of poetry, including Frolic and Detour (2019), One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), Maggot (2010), Horse Latitudes (2006), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Hay (1998), The Annals of Chile (1994), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), Meeting the British (1987), Quoof (1983),Why Brownlee Left (1980), Mules (1977) and New Weather (1973). He has also published innumerable smaller collections, works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics and radio and television drama. His poetry has been translated into twenty languages. In addition to being much in demand as a reader and lecturer, he occasionally appears with a spoken word music group, Rogue Oliphant. He also developed and devised Muldoon’s Picnic, a mixum-gatherum of poetry, prose and music at the Irish Arts Center in New York City. With his wife, American novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, he adapted James Joyce’s “The Dead” as an immersive, site-specific play, “The Dead, 1904.” Paul Muldoon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, the 2017 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the 2018 Seamus Heaney Award for Arts & Letters. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from ten universities.