October Calliope Poetry

 

Calliope Poetry continues its fall season Sunday, October 11th, 3-5pm at the library. Featured poets include:

Afaa Michael Weaver has authored 13 collections of poetry, including The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 and The Government of Nature, for which he won the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Born in Baltimore, he worked in a factory for 15 years until 1985, when he received an NEA fellowship in poetry and also entered the graduate writing program at Brown University. He began his teaching career in 1987, and today he is the Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons College in Boston. In addition to the Kingsley Tufts Award, he has received multiple Pushcart prizes, a Pew fellowship, and the May Sarton Award, among others. A student of Chinese culture and language for most of his life, Weaver received the Gold Friendship Medal in 2005 from the Beijing Writers Association for his work with Chinese poets. In 2014, Weaver completed his Plum Flower Trilogy with the publication of his 14th collection of poetry, City of Eternal Spring (University of Pittsburgh Press).

Jennifer Tseng’s first book, The Man With My Face, won the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a PEN American Center Open Book Award. Her second book, Red Flower, White Flower, won the Marick Press Poetry Prize; it features Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen. Tseng’s debut novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions 2015), was a finalist for the New England Book Award and has been featured in the Boston Globe, LA Times, Huffington Post, Elle Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel, Woo, the imagined story of her father’s life.

Elizabeth Bradfield lives on Cape Cod, works as a naturalist locally as well as on expedition ships, and is currently the poet-in-residence at Brandeis University and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at University of Alaska Anchorage. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Orion, and elsewhere, and her honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and a Bread Loaf scholarship. She is the author of the poetry collections Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work, and most recently, Once Removed (Persea Books, 2015), which continues her ongoing exploration of humans in their natural habitat. Whether afloat on the Amazon or wandering her home turf of Cape Cod, Bradfield connects her natural surroundings with the most essential of human longings.