Join SHP co-editors and SHP Advisory Committee as they welcome four poets with debut first books! Stephen Ackerman, Theresa Burns, Diamond Forde, Myra Malkin, and David O’Connell will read from their new books and answer audience questions about craft and publishing their first collections.
This reading will take place on Zoom. The link will be sent to the email that you use to register as soon as you reserve a spot. (Please check your spam folder and save the link to your calendar.) It will also be sent to you the day of the reading for your convenience.
Stephen Ackerman worked as an attorney in the Legal Counsel Division of the New York City Law Department for over 30 years, and retired in 2019. His poems have appeared in many publications, including Best New Poets 2010, Boulevard, Columbia Review, Jewish Quarterly, Mudfish, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Red Wheelbarrow, Salamander, Seneca Review and upstreet, as well as on Poetry Daily. His debut poetry collection, Late Life, was selected as the winner of the 2020 Gerald Cable Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2022.
Theresa Burns‘ debut collection of poems, Design, was published in 2022 by Terrapin Books. She is also the author of the chapbook Two Train Town (2017). Her poetry, reviews, and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, Verse Daily, The Cortland Review, The Night Heron Barks, Plume, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee and former book editor, she is the founder of the community-based reading series Watershed Literary Events and teaches writing in and around New York.
Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. She has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Pink Poetry Prize, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and CLA’s Margaret Walker Memorial Prize, and placed in the Frontier Poetry’s New Poets Award. She is a Callaloo and Tin House fellow, whose work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, NELLE, Tupelo Quarterly and more. Diamond serves as the assistant editor of Southeast Review, and the fiction editor for Nat. Brut.
Diamond has earned a Bachelors in English from the University of West Georgia. She holds an MFA from The University of Alabama and a PhD from Florida State University.
Myra Malkin is the author of Sunset Grand Couturier (Broadstone Books, 2022) In 2016, in a contest judged by Edward Hirsch, her poem “Wallis-Wallace” won the 12th Mudfish Poetry Prize. After growing up in New York City, she studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London. She was a founding member of the New Repertory Company, an off-off Broadway group that performed in a former funeral parlor. She then attended Cornell Law School and, for fifteen years, was a legal services attorney in upstate New York. She now lives in Manhattan.
David O’Connell’s first full-length collection, Our Best Defense, was published in 2022 by Červená Barva Press. His chapbook, A Better Way to Fall, was awarded the 2013 Philbrick Poetry Award from the Providence Athenaeum, and his poetry has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Lake Effect, Tar River Poetry Review, and North American Review, among other journals. David has received fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and earned his MFA from Ohio State University. He is married to the poet Julie Danho and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.