Poetry Foundation’s Winter/Spring 2017 Events

CHICAGO – The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce its Winter/Spring 2017 events season. This season brings together a national coalition of poetry organizations to present programs around the theme “Because we come from everything: Poetry & Migration.” In March, the literary organizations Letras Latinas and Kundiman present four young poets: Emmy Pérez, Tarfia Faizullah, José B. González, and Hieu Minh Nguyen. The coalition’s title comes from a poem by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who will share the fruit of his year-long work with Chicago Public School teachers at the Chicago Public Library’s Poetry Fest. Among the season’s highlights are an unprecedented reading of living black Pulitzer Prize-winning poets, a conference at the University of Chicago featuring leading poets, artists, and scholars, and the launch of The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks with Patricia Smith and Terrance Hayes.

Also featured are collaborations with the Experimental Sound Studio and the Fifth House Ensemble’s world premiere of Stacy Garrop’s “And All Time.”

The Poetry Foundation Gallery presents the photography exhibition Jun Fujita: Oblivion from January 12 – April 21. An English-language tanka poet who published regularly in Poetry magazine during the 1920s, Jun Fujita was the first Japanese-American photojournalist.

Except when otherwise noted, the following events are free and open to the public on a first come, first served basis at the Poetry Foundation, 61 West Superior Street, Chicago. More information is available at poetryfoundation.org/events. Images are available upon request.

Poetry Foundation Winter/Spring 2017 Events

January

The Open Door Readings
University of Chicago’s Nathan Hoks & Claire Sylvester Smith with ChiArts’s Ruben Quesada & Oona Winners
Tuesday, January 17, 7 pm
The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors accompanied by a current or recent student.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Drinking Gourd: An Evening of Poetry & Music
Thursday, January 19, 7 pm
Celebrate Jenny Xie and Mayda del Valle, the winners of this year’s Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize, a first-book award for poets of color. Jenny Xie is the author of Nowhere to Arrive and has contributed poetry to Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. Mayda del Valle was the 2001 Grand Slam Champion and went on to win the 2001 National Poetry Slam individual title. A native of Chicago’s South Side, she is a teaching artist with the Los Angeles nonprofit Street Poets Inc. The evening includes a performance by composer, producer, and double bass player Tatsu Aoki and the Tatsu Aoki Reduction Quartet.
Cosponsored with the Northwestern Poetry & Poetics Colloquium

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Poetry off the Shelf
Robin Coste Lewis
Wednesday, January 25, 7 pm
Robin Coste Lewis is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus, winner of the 2015 National Book Award for poetry. The collection is an absorbing and moving meditation on the “Sable Venus” and other images of black womanhood that are scattered through the pages of history and linger with us today.

February

Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial
Our Miss Brooks 100
Thursday, February 2, 6 pm
Rubloff Auditorium
Art Institute of Chicago
230 South Columbus Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60603
Ticket required, free with museum admission
Presented as part of a centennial initiative honoring the legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American poet to receive the Pulitzer Prize, Our Miss Brooks 100 brings together five African American Pulitzer Prize winning poets—Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, Tracy K. Smith, and Gregory Pardlo—for an evening of poetry and conversation.
Presented in collaboration with the Chicago Community Trust, the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guild Literary Complex, and Brooks Permissions, with the encouragement of the Pulitzer Prizes.

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Poetry & Art
Poetry AIDS Chicago: A Response to Art AIDS America
Thursday, February 2, 7 pm
Alphawood Gallery
2401 North Halsted Street
Chicago, Illinois 60614
The groundbreaking exhibition Art AIDS America underscores the deep and unforgettable presence of HIV in art as it introduces and explores the whole spectrum of artistic responses to AIDS, from the politically outspoken to the quietly mournful, surveying works from the early 1980s to the present. This reading brings together queer and trans poets based in Chicago, who will conduct their own poetic tour of the exhibition, reading works inspired by the themes in the show. Featuring poets and multidisciplinary performers Bea Cordelia, T Clutch Fleischmann, Ruben Quesada, and avery r. young.
Cosponsored with the Alphawood Foundation

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Poetry off the Shelf
Angel Nafis & Shira Erlichman
Monday, February 13, 7 pm
Angel Nafis, author of BlackGirl Mansion (2012), is a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is a recipient of the Millay Colony residency and a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. With poet Morgan Parker she is The Other Black Girl Collective, a Black Feminist poetry duo that tours internationally. Shira Erlichman is a poet, musician, and visual artist. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she was awarded a residency by the Millay Colony and the James Merrill Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center. As a musician she has performed her experimental pop-folk across the US. Her new album Subtle Creature premiered in October 2016 in BUST Magazine.
Cosponsored with Young Chicago Authors

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The Open Door Readings
DePaul University’s Eric Plattner & Logan Breitbart with Northwestern University’s Toby Altman & Kathryn West
Tuesday, February 21, 7 pm
The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students. The Poetry Foundation Library will extend its hours through 7 pm prior to the reading.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Rumi’s Secret by Brad Gooch
Thursday, February 23, 7 pm
The New York Times bestselling author Brad Gooch delivers the first popular biography of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi mysitc revered by contemporary Western readers. The ecstatic love poems of Rumi have millions of fans around the world, yet Rumi’s life has long remained the stuff of legend rather than intimate knowledge. In this breakthrough biography, Brad Gooch brilliantly brings the man to life, vividly coloring in his time and place—a world as rife with conflict as our own. 

March

Harriet Reading Series
francine j harris
Thursday, March 2, 7 pm
The Harriet Reading Series features talks, performances, and readings by poets who have appeared on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. francine j. harris is the author of allegiance (2012), a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award; and play dead (2016). A 2008 Cave Canem fellow, she has also won the 2014 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest and was awarded a 2015 NEA fellowship. Harris is the writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Celebration
National Youth Poet Laureate Convocation featuring Jacqueline Woodson
Friday, March 10, 1 pm
Saturday, March 11, 6pm
Jacqueline Woodson introduces a reading by National Youth Poet Laureates. Urban Word NYC, an award-winning youth literary arts and youth development organization, created The National Youth Poet Laureate program in collaboration with local youth literary arts organizations across the country. Jacqueline Woodson, author of the National Book Award-winning memoir in verse Brown Girl Dreaming, was named Young People’s Poet Laureate in 2015.
Cosponsored with Urban Word NYC

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The Open Door Readings
Northwestern University's C Russell Price with Young Chicago Authors' Kevin Coval
Tuesday, March 21, 7 pm
The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland college and graduate writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students. The Poetry Foundation Library will extend its hours through 7 pm prior to the reading.

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Poetry on Stage
Beau O’Reilly and friends present Samuel Beckett’s “All That Fall”
Wednesday, March 22, 7 pm and Thursday, March 23, 7 pm
Beau O’Reilly and his cohorts from the Curious Theater Branch present Samuel Beckett’s 1956 one-act radio play, All That Fall. The play follows Maddy Rooney as she walks to meet her husband’s train on his birthday, but becomes a complex psychological journey through life and death, past and present, age and youth, art and nature, and man’s fallen, or falling state.

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Poetry & Music
Fifth House Ensemble
Friday, March 24, 7 pm
The Chicago-based Fifth House Ensemble is a versatile and dynamic group praised by the New York Times for its “conviction, authority, and finesse.” The ensemble engages curiosity to create unexpected connections with artistic collaborators and audiences of all types. Over the last decade, the ensemble has engaged theater groups, visual artists, animators, composers, astronomers, folk musicians, and corporate innovators through transformative cross-media performance experiences. This concert marks the world premiere of Stacy Garrop’s “And All Time” based on four poems with different takes on time.
Cosponsored with Fifth House Ensemble

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Poetry off the Shelf
Poetry & Migration
Wednesday, March 29, 7 pm
“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the inaugural theme of the Poetry Coalition, a collective of twenty organizations around the country, who will present programs on the shared topic in March. This reading, cosponsored with Kundiman and Letras Latinas, presents poets Hieu Minh Nguyen, José B. González, Tarfia Faizullah, and Emmy Pérez.

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Harriet Reading Series
Eric Amling
Thursday, March 30, 7 pm
The Harriet Reading Series features talks, performances, and readings by poets who have appeared on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. Eric Amling is a poet, designer, and visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of From the Author’s Private Collection (2015); his chapbooks include From the Author’s Private Collection (2013) and Legal Pure (2012).

April

Young People’s Poetry Day
A Celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks
Saturday, April 1, 10 am – 1 pm
Celebrate National Poetry Month and the centennial of Gwendolyn Brooks’ birth with a delightful open house for children at the Poetry Foundation Library. This special weekend event features readings and a variety of interactive activities. Motionpoems, a Minneapolis-based poetry film company, premieres a series of animated poems for children.
Please note the Poetry Foundation will be open only to youth and their caregivers during this event.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Adrian Matejka
Tuesday, April 4, 7 pm
Adrian Matejka’s first collection of poems, The Devil’s Garden (2003), won the 2002 New York / New England Award. His second collection, Mixology (2009), was a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. The Big Smoke (2013), which focuses on the life of boxer Jack Johnson, was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. His new book of poems, Map to the Stars, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House in April.

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Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial
Brooks Conference at University of Chicago
Thursday, April 6 – Saturday, April 8
Various locations.
Visit poetryfoundation.org/events for conference schedule.
This Gwendolyn Brooks centennial event is both a scholarly conference and a celebration, gathering scholars, writers and musicians in tribute to her. Brooks spent most of her life on Chicago’s South Side, whose Bronzeville neighborhood she memorialized in her poetry. She was the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize and the first black woman appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Later in life, as Poet Laureate of Illinois, she personally funded literary awards for young writers and visited grade schools, colleges, universities, prisons, hospitals, and drug rehabilitation centers.
Cosponsored with the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, the University of Chicago’s Committee on Creative Writing, and the DuSable Museum

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Poetry & Music
Experimental Sound Studio: interpreting bardem interpreting
Friday, April 7, 7 pm
The duo Vincent Barras & Jacques Demierre extends an experimental tradition of sound and poetry at the boundaries of established categories such as literature, scenic arts, and music. The starting point of their new piece, interpreting bardem interpreting, is the sound material recorded during the shooting of the documentary Voicing through Saussure by Véronique Goël (2009). The duo enact speech as sound through concrete vocal and articulatory experiments and discuss the compositional and poetic procedures they employ. Demierre and Barras are visiting artists-in-residence at the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. 
Cosponsored with the Experimental Sound Studio

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Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial
Golden Shovel with Patricia Smith & Terrance Hayes
Wednesday, April 12, 7 pm
Celebrate the publication of The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks with editors Peter Kahn and Patricia Smith, recipient of the Lenore Marshall Prize, along with contributors to the collection. Terrance Hayes, National Book Award winner and inventor of the golden shovel form, will also be featured.

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Open Door Readings
Columbia College’s David Trinidad & Brianna Noll with University of Illinois at Chicago’s Christina Pugh & Benjamin Williams
Tuesday, April 18, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation Library & Gallery are open to the public until 7 pm.
The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors accompanied by a current or recent student.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Reginald Gibbons & Angela Jackson
Thursday, April 20, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
Poet, editor, and professor Reginald Gibbons is the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (1997), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize, and Creatures of a Day (2008), finalist for the National Book Award. His new collection is Last Lake (2016). Poet, novelist, and playwright Angela Jackson’s most recent volume of poems, It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time (2015), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN Open Book Award. Her latest novel, Roads Where There Are No Roads, a sequel to her American Book Award-winning Where I Must Go (2009), is forthcoming in 2017 from Northwestern University Press.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Tanka Poet Nagata Kazuhiro
Friday, April 21, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
A reception follows the program
Nagata Kazuhiro, in addition to being one of the world’s foremost molecular and cellular biologists, is also a celebrated tanka poet. Tanka is an ancient lyric form with a 5/7/5/7/7 syllable pattern that has been practiced in Japan for more than 1,300 years. At Poetry Foundation, Nagata Kazuhiro reads from For Instance, Sweetheart, a forty-year love story told through exchanging tanka with his late wife, the poet Kawano Yūko. The program, which includes commentary about the tanka form, will be in English with a few tanka offered both in translation and the original Japanese.
Cosponsored with the Consulate-General of Japan in Chicago and Northwestern University

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Celebration
ChiTeen Lit Fest
Friday – Saturday, April 21–22
Various locations at Columbia College Chicago and Harold Washington Library.
Visit chiteenlitfest.org for schedule of events
The ChiTeen Lit Fest aims to provide a safe and creative space for young adults to unlock and discover their unique voice through literary arts. The Fest seeks to bring together young people from across Chicago and celebrate their talents as they express themselves through exceptional and honest art. Nate Marshall, the award-winning poet and author of Wild Hundreds (2015), will headline the festival. This is a teens only event, for ages 13–19 years old.

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Iraqi Mutual Aid Society
Middle Eastern Poetry Festival
Saturday, April 22, 2 pm
Poetry Foundation
A reception follows the program
The Iraqi Mutual Aid Society returns again with its 5th annual Poetry Festival. Come enjoy the rich tradition of multilingual poems in Arabic and other languages from the Middle East by refugees and immigrants from the cradle of civilization. English translations will be provided.
Cosponsored with the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society

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Poetry off the Shelf
Chicago Public Library Poetry Fest
Saturday, April 29, 2 pm
Harold Washington Library Center
400 South State Street
Join us for a culminating event of Juan Felipe Herrera’s Chicago signature project as US Poet Laureate. Herrera has worked with forty 9^th-grade English teachers throughout the 2016–2017 academic year to advance student learning through poetry and connect teachers from across the city. The project, “Wordstreet Champions and Brave Builders of the Dream” is a partnership among the Chicago Public Schools, the Library of Congress, Chicago Public Library, and the Poetry Foundation.

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Celebration
Poesía en Abril
Saturday, April 29, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
Poesía en Abril is an annual multicultural and multidisciplinary festival that celebrates local, national and international poetry in Spanish. We invite you to a great celebration of readings, performances, multimedia presentations, panels and contests. The program is multilingual.
Cosponsored with contratiempo

May

Poetry off the Shelf
Fifth Wednesday Journal: Janice Harrington, Kevin Stein, Rachel Jamison Webster & Quraysh Ali Lansana
Wednesday, May 10, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
A reception follows the program
Janice N. Harrington is the author of the poetry collections Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (2011), and Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin (2016), as well as several award-winning children’s books. Poet and critic Kevin Stein was named Illinois Poet Laureate in 2003. A professor of English and the director of the creative writing program at Bradley University, Stein is known for the humor and insight of his poems, and the lucidity of his prose. Rachel Jamison Webster lives in Chicago and teaches poetry at Northwestern University. She edits the online anthology of international poetry, UniVerse. Quraysh Ali Lansana is the author of the poetry collections mystic turf (2012), They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems (2004), and Southside Rain (2000). He has been a literary teaching artist and curriculum developer for over a decade and has led workshops in prisons, public schools, and universities in over 30 states.
Cosponsored with Fifth Wednesday Journal

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Open Door Readings
University of Chicago’s Hannah Brooks-Motl & John Setzco with Columbia College Chicago’s Michael Robins & Jose-Luis Moctezuma
Tuesday, May 16, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation Library & Gallery are open to the public until 7 pm.
The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors accompanied by a current or recent student.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Elise Paschen & Laura Kasischke
Thursday, May 25, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
Elise Paschen is the author of Bestiary (2009), Infidelities (1996), winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts (1985). The Nightlife, her new collection, will be published by Red Hen Press in Spring 2017. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Poet and novelist Laura Kasischke has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. Her latest novel is Mind of Winter (2014) and her new collection is Where Now: New & Selected Poems (2017).

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Poetry & Music
Inna Faliks & Deborah Landau
Saturday, May 27, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
Created by acclaimed pianist Inna Faliks, Music/Words is an interdisciplinary performance series that explores the connections between poetry and music in the form of a live recital and reading with poet, essayist, and critic Deborah Landau.

June

Celebration
Literature for All of Us Poetry Bash
Wednesday, June 7, 9 am – 12 pm
Poetry Foundation
Literature for All of Us brings the rewards of reading and writing through book group discussions to teen mothers and other participants in underserved neighborhoods. Join Literature for All of Us book group participants for an end of the school year celebration. Students come together to share their perspectives on the world in poetic verse. Enjoy poetry of peace, of protest, and of community.
Cosponsored with Literature for All of Us

 

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Exhibition
Jun Fujita: Oblivion
January 12 – April 21, 2017
Monday – Friday, 11 am – 4 pm
This exhibition presents photographs and ephemera from the poet Jun Fujita (1888–1963). Fujita is an English-language tanka poet who published regularly in Poetry during the 1920s. The first Japanese-American photojournalist, he is responsible for the most famous photos of the Eastland disaster, the Chicago race riots of 1919, and the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, among others. This show will explore his lesser-known landscapes.

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About the Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit poetryfoundation.org.

About Poetry Magazine
Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Monroe’s “Open Door” policy, set forth in Volume 1 of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented— often for the first time— works by virtually every major contemporary poet.

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POETRY FOUNDATION | 61 West Superior Street | Chicago, IL 60654 | 312.787.7070

Media contact:
Polly Faust, [email protected], 312.799.8065
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