Party Like A Poet: A National Poetry Month Event

Party Like A Poet: A National Poetry Month Event

Tuesday, April 28, 2015 at 7:00pm

Poets doing what they do best. Housing Works Bookstore Cafe & Poetry Society of America are proud to host a bash for National Poetry Month, with support from media sponsors Academy of American Poets, Cave Canem Foundation, and Wave Books. With limited complimentary drinks, generously provided by our friends at Poetry Society of America.
Readings by Cate Marvin, Danez Smith, Wendy Xu, Sharon Olds, Patricia Smith, Matthew Rohrer, and Rickey Laurentiis. With guest emcee Morgan Parker (Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night).
About our readers:
Cate Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinksy for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books. She co-edited with poet Michael Dumanis the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award, was published by Sarabande. Her third book of poems, Oracle, was published this spring by W.W. Norton & Co. She is a receipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and co-founder of the nonprofit organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, with poet Erin Belieu.
Rickey Laurentiis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy and a Chancellor's Fellowship from Washington University in St Louis, where he received his MFA. His first book of poems, Boy with Thorn, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in fall of 2015.
Sharon Olds is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Dead and the Living, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Stag's Leap which received the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pulitzer Prize. She teaches at New York University's Graduate Program in Creative Writing where she has been involved with N.Y.U.’s outreach workshops, including the Goldwater Hospital workshop, in its 28th year, and the workshop for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of several books of poems, most recently Surrounded by Friends, published by Wave Books. He is also co-translator of Tone Skrjanec's Skin, published by Tavern Books. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at NYU.
Danez Smith is a very black, very queer, poz writer from Minneapolis, MN. He is the author of [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Norma Farber First Book Award. In 2017, his 2nd and currently untitled full-length collection will be published by Graywolf Books. In the fall he will beginning his studies for an MFA at the University of Michigan. He is a 2014 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a McKnight Foundation Fellow, A Cave Canem Fellow and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. You can find him eating gummy worms and dreaming of Drake in the back of a reading near you.
Patricia Smith is the author of six critically-acknowledged volumes of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, which was awarded the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, was the winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series winner (all from Coffee House Press); Close to Death and Big Towns, Big Talk (both from Zoland Books), and Life According to Motown. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast. She is a Cave Canem faculty member, a professor of English at CUNY/College of Staten Island and a faculty member of the Sierra Nevada MFA program.
Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013), and several chapbooks including Naturalism (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015 forthcoming). In 2014 she was the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Recent poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at CUNY.


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