Thursday, April 14th, 2022
Looking Back, Looking Forward:
A Reading with Jan Beatty and Dana Levin
5pm-6pm / PT
Poets Jan Beatty and Dana Levin will join us for an evening that will celebrate their award winning poetry and celebrate the foremothers who inspired them. Each poet will begin the evening by introducing the foremother poet who influenced her work. Then, Beatty and Levin will share their own new work.
Participants:
Jan Beatty is the winner of the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard (2021). Her sixth book, The Body Wars (2020), was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. In the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said: Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Books include Jackknife: New and Collected Poems (2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Beatty worked as a waitress, a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, and in maximum-security prisons.
Dana Levin’s fifth book is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon, Spring 2022), a Lannan Literary Selection. Recent books include Banana Palace (2016) and Sky Burial (2011), which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” She is a grateful recipient of honors, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, and the Library of Congress, as well as from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.
Jan Beatty and Dana Levin will share their most recent work. Audience members will not only learn about these current poets, they will also discover writers from the past.
Looking forward to this