On Sunday, May 5, the Katonah Poetry Series (KPS) is honored to feature award-winning poet Maggie Smith. Smith’s poetry addresses critical questions of our time, such as, How do you preserve hope and safety in a precarious world, especially for the children? How do we nurse ourselves through each news-shaken day? These themes were so vividly illuminated in Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones” that it went viral in 2016 and was translated into nearly a dozen languages. Public Radio International dubbed “Good Bones” “the official poem of 2016.” According to Julie Marie Wade on The Rumpus, “… if the book called Good Bones has a moral, it’s about learning to grow where planted. It’s also about learning how to look danger in the eye, how to acknowledge the thing that wants to stop us—uproot us, undo us—and then refusing to let it.”
Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (2015); and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005). Smith is also the author of three prizewinning chapbooks: Disasterology (Dream Horse Press, 2016); The List of Dangers (Kent State/Wick Poetry Series, 2010); and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). Her poems have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among others. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, on the Poetry Foundation website, and elsewhere.
By turn both playful and profound, the Katonah Poetry Series is pleased to present Maggie Smith’s deeply humane voice. Doors open at 3:30 pm for the reading, which begins at 4:00 p.m., followed by an audience Q&A, reception and book signing. Copies of Smith's books will be available for sale. For further information and to read our exclusive KPS poet interviews, conducted by poet Ann van Buren, please visit www.katonahpoetry.com.