Join a star-studded lineup of poets, including Joy Harjo, Garrett Hongo, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, and Natasha Trethewey, to celebrate award-winning poet and advocate Edward Hirsch’s newly published 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. In this inspiring anthology, Hirsch selects some of the most moving and inspiring poems of the last 200 years from around the world to comfort and enthrall anyone trapped by grief or loneliness. Don’t miss this free, virtual reading, featuring some of today’s most distinguished poets reading work from the book, including their own, and in conversation with Edward Hirsch.
The reading will be live-streamed via Zoom. To receive a link to the Zoom event, register today: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Pvdm4zx7QZOmDfbONZXmlQ
JOY HARJO is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is serving her third term as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. The author of nine books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise, several plays and children's books, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, her many honors include the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums including her newest, I Pray for My Enemies. She is Executive Editor of the anthology When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and the editor of Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and holds a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
EDWARD HIRSCH has published ten books of poetry and six books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller. He has received numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. A longtime professor, Hirsch is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
GARRETT HONGO was born in Volcano, Hawaiʻi and grew up on the North Shore of Oʻahu and in Los Angeles. He was educated at Pomona College, the University of Michigan, and UC Irvine, where he received an M.F.A. His work includes Coral Road: Poems and two other books of poetry, three anthologies, Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi, and The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays. Among his honors are the Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship (to Italy), two NEA grants, and the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. In 1989, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Currently, he’s at work on The Ocean of Clouds (poems). He teaches at the University of Oregon.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA’s books of poetry include Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Warhorses, Emperor of Water Clocks, and most recently Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth. His honors include the William Faulkner Prize (Université Rennes, France), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Wallace Stevens Award, the 2021 Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2021 Zbigniew Herbert Award. His collaborations, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally and include Saturnalia, Wakonda’s Dream, Testimony, Gilgamesh, and Jupiter Invincible.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE is the Young People's Poet Laureate (Poetry Foundation). Palestinian-American, she was born in St. Louis and lives in San Antonio, Texas. From 2010 to 2015 she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2020 she received the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critic's Circle. Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry include Everything Comes Next: Collected & New Poems, Cast Away, Voices in the Air, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours. Her novels for young readers include Habibi, Going Going, and The Turtle of Oman.
SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and England's T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag's Leap, she is the author of eleven previous books of poetry and the winner of many other honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead and the Living. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Native Guard (2006)—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and, most recently, Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018); a book of non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010); and a memoir, Memorial Drive (2020) an instant New York Times Bestseller. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2019, Trethewey was awarded the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress. Currently, she is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.