Fordham Notes: Poets Out Loud
Showing posts with label Poets Out Loud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poets Out Loud. Show all posts

Friday, March 7, 2014

Book Launch for POL Prizewinners

Sara Michas-Martin
Every year, Fordham’s 22-year-old Poets Out Loud (POL), the community of poetry at Fordham Lincoln Center, administers two book prizes besides holding several poetry readings.

The two segments join forces for an annual book launch of the previous year's winners, whose winning manuscripts are published by Fordham University Press.

English professor Elisabeth Frost, Ph.D., edits the book prize series.

“We’re looking for the best and most interesting work that’s being done,” said  Elisabeth Frost, Ph.D., who edits the book prize series. 

Peter Streckfus
Last year, poet and visiting contest judge Susan Wheeler selected Sara Michas-Martin as winner of the POL Prize for her collection titled Gray Matter.

The POL Editor’s Prize went to Peter Streckfus for his collection, Errings.

You can hear all three poets read at the official book launch, to be held on Monday,  March 10, at 7 p.m. at the at Lincoln Center Campus 12th-floor Lounge/Corrigan Conference Center. The event is free and open to the public.

And you can find out more about the authors and their books here.




Monday, April 23, 2012

Music and Poetry to Come Together in Annual Concert at Lincoln Center Campus

Lawrence Kramer, Ph.D., built a distinguished scholarly career around the relationship between his two passions, music and literature. So it was only a matter of time before he would come up with the idea for the event that will be held Saturday, April 28 at the Lincoln Center campus.
 
He was chatting with colleagues about the University’s Poets Out Loud program a few years ago when the conversation turned to music. “This sort of light bulb went on in my head,” said Kramer, Distinguished Professor in the Department of English.

The result was a series of concerts that combine poetry readings with performances of the poems’ musical versions. The third annual event in the series, Voices Up: New Music for New Poetry, will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the 12th-Floor Lounge of the Lowenstein Building. The concert was organized in conjunction with Poets Out Loud. Admission is free.

The event will feature original works by several prize-winning artists. A cellist, violinist and vocalist will perform new works by composers Paul Moravec—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—and David Dzubay, who wrote music for poems by Julie Choffel. Choffel, a member of the faculty at the University of Connecticut, will read from her book The Hello Delay, published by Fordham University Press. The book was the winner of the Poets Out Loud book competition for 2012.

The accompanying music will be performed by violinist Madalyn Parnas, cellist Cicely Parnas, and soprano Sharon Harms, all of whom are students at Indiana University, where David Dzubay teaches. Because their lineup includes the premiere of a piece by Kramer, who is a prize-winning composer, he will read the poetry he wrote as the song's lyrics. In addition, a work by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag, comprising fragments from the work of Franz Kafka, will be performed.

This year’s event departs from the standard voice-and-piano format of classical song. The combination of violin, cello and voice “creates all kinds of interesting possibilities, which we’re eager to explore,” Kramer said.

He noted that the event belongs to a centuries-long tradition of marrying poetry with music. He cited the example of prolific composer Franz Schubert, an avid reader of poetry and friend of many poets, who wrote his songs using their poems as lyrics as soon as they were published.
 
“That’s the way it works in the world of classical song,” he said. “The idea is that you create a relationship between musical expression and poetic expression.”
 
Because it can be distracting for audience members to follow the poet’s words on paper, he said, the format includes no copies of the poems. Audience members will only listen: First they will hear the poem read, and then they will hear it sung.
 
“What happens is the expressive additions that come about by putting it to music become more available to people, because they’ve heard the poet reading the poem in the poet’s own voice,” he said. “That really has an impact, we discovered.”
 
                                                                                                                            -- Chris Gosier

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

New Fordham Poetry, Make That Times Three


Congratulations to three members of Fordham University’s Department of English, who have each published a new volume of poetry—all within a month of each other (more or less).

The authors are Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., John D. Boyd, S.J., Chair in the Poetic Imagination (left), Elisabeth Frost, Ph.D., associate professor of English and Women’s Studies (center), and Janet Kaplan, Fordham's poet-in-residence (right).

Dubrow’s book, Forms and Hollows (Cherry-Grove Press, 2011), includes poems in a range of forms as well as free verse. Its subjects also range widely, including the death of a parent, the cities of Paris, Sydney, and New York, and the everyday topics of teaching and food (herbs, bread). The publisher states that “Dubrow writes with a quiet, intimate sensibility that hits similar notes whether she is writing a dramatic monologue or a personal lyric.”
You can read more at http://www.cherry-grove.com/dubrow.html

Frost’s debut collection of poetry, All Of Us, (White Pine Press, 2011) is described as “narrative prose poems that explore misfires of communication, gaps in memory, and the simple limitations of language that cause frustration and isolation. The title poem explores a cityscape where community is vertically compressed, and strangers – who are also neighbors – appear eye-to-eye at the peep holes of their locked doors.”

For more on the book visit http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781935210238/default.aspx

Lastly, poet Janet Kaplan has published a third collection of poetry, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist (Notre Dame, 2011), which won the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, sponsored by the creative writing program at Notre Dame.. The poems and sonnets are “packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet’s ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation,” the publisher writes. The award is given annually to writers who have published at least one volume of poetry. For more information visit http://undpress.nd.edu/book/P01472


Perhaps these talented poets will show up on Thursday, March 24, when Poets Out Loud hosts its Fordham Faculty Reading at 7 p.m. in the 12th Floor Lounge of Lowenstein Center.

—Janet Sassi

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Poets Out Loud kicks off spring semester with readings by Gregerson, Phillips


Poets Linda Gregerson and Rowan Ricardo Phillips read from their work on Jan. 24 at Fordham University’s Lowenstein Center, 12th-Floor Lounge, 113 W. 60th St., in Manhattan, as part of the Poets Out Loud series.

Video clips of the readings appear below.

A 2007 National Book Award finalist and a recent Guggenheim Fellow, Gregerson (top photo) is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature.

Of her poems, The New Yorker has written, “Gregerson’s rich aesthetic allows her best poems to resonate metaphysically.” Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry as well as in the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly and other publications.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a poet, scholar and translator and associate professor of English at Stony Brook University. His poems have appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review and Callalo, among other venues. He is the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Dalkey Archive, 2010) and a forthcoming collection of poems entitled The Ground.

-Gina Vergel




Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Poets Out Loud: Performance, Symposium and Contest

Poetry, Music, and Visual Arts

Thursday, November 4, 2010 | 7 p.m.
Poets Out Loud at Fordham University
presents
featuring
Anna Rabinowitz
Bino Realuyo
with graduate student
Amanda M. Calderón
in conjunction with
Turning Tides: A Symposium on Diasporic Literature

12th Floor Lounge | Lincoln Center Campus
Reception & Book Signing to follow
Free and open to the public


Turning Tides: A Symposium on Diasporic Literatures

Saturday, November 6, 2010 | 1 p.m.
McNally Amphitheatre | Lincoln Center Campus
www.turningtides.squarespace.com

This creative and scholarly symposium which will highlight three different legacies of diaspora in the United States: Haiti, The Philippines and Puerto Rico. Each panel will feature a short scholarly talk, a reading by two writers followed by a moderated conversation. What do Filipino American writers take for granted, in terms of artistic freedom? In what political and aesthetic ways are Puerto Rican writers employing creative disobedience? Until January 2010, descendents of the Haitian diaspora could call Haiti their home—that geography has been rent. What kind of scattering will result? And, how will it be told by writers?

The principle aim of Turning Tides is to involve prominent artists and scholars in an exchange of ideas for the purpose of proactively responding to the growing phenomena of American diaspora as it is in the making and to ground and contextualize this conversation within a critical understanding of a larger global history.
Free and Open to the Public.
  • 1 p.m. Opening Remarks: Yvette Christiansë
  • 1:15 p.m. Panel on Haiti: After the Earthquake with J. Michael Dash, Denize Lauture, Yolaine M. St. Fort
  • 2:15 p.m. Panel on Puerto Rico: Creative Disobedience in New Nuyorican Writing with Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Willie Perdomo, Edwin Torres
  • 3:15 p.m. Break
  • 3:30 p.m. Panel on the Philippines: The Artist as Activist with Nerissa S. Balce, Bino Realuyo, Melissa Roxas
  • 4:30 p.m. Reading and Reception
Speakers

Nerissa S. Balce is Assistant Professor of Asian American literature at Stony Brook University’s Department of Asian and Asian American Studies. She was born and raised in Manila, Philippines. She worked as a journalist in Manila, writing articles on Philippine literature, politics, culture and the arts. She took doctoral studies at the University of California-Berkeley where she received a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies. Before joining Stony Brook University, she taught at the University of Oregon’s Ethnic Studies Program as a post-doctoral fellow, and at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst as an Assistant Professor of comparative literature. She is currently completing a book manuscript on American imperialism as a visual language and the image of the Filipino savage.

Yvette Christiansë is a novelist, poet, and scholar. She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was raised in that city, and Cape Town, as well as Mbabane, Swaziland. In her late teens her family moved to Australia to escape apartheid. Her first full volume of poetry, Castaway, which was nominated for the PEN International prize. In 2006, she published the novel, Unconfessed, which was a finalist for the Hemingway/PEN Prize for first fiction and recipient of the 2007 ForeWord Magazine BEA Award. She teaches African American and postcolonial literatures, as well as poetics, at Fordham University.

Daniel Contreras is the author of What Have You Done to My Heart: Unrequited Loved and Gay Latino Culture and is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University. His new work focuses on Latino literature and the problem of mediation.

Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Fordham University in New York. He is author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (Palgrave 2007), a book about the relationship between high art and Latino popular culture in the gentrifying New York of the 1980s. He is also author of a study on the prose fiction of one of Latin America’s most important twentieth-century writers, José Lezama Lima, El primitivo implorante (Rodopi 1994), and coeditor with Martin Manalansan of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York UP 2002). He teaches courses on contemporary Caribbean literatures and New York in Latino literature and film at Fordham. He has been the recipient of the NEH and Ford Foundation fellowships and has been invited professor at Harvard, Emory, and the University of Pennsylvania.

J. Michael Dash is Professor of French at New York University and director of the Africana Studies Program. He is the author of Literature and Ideology in Haiti (1981), Haiti and the United States (1988), Édouard Glissant (1995), The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998), and Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001); editor (with Charles Arthur) of Libete: A Haiti Anthology (1999); and translator of Gisèle Pineau's The Drifting of Spirits (1999). He is currently at work on a manuscript entitled "Surrealism in the Francophone Caribbean."

Luis H. Francia who has lived in New York since the 1970s is the author of several other books, including Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, which won both the 2002 PEN Center Open Book and the 2002 Asian American Writers literary awards. His poetry collections include the recently released The Beauty of Ghosts (performed as theater at Topaz Arts in 2007); Museum of Absences; and The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems. He is also the author of A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos, published this year. He edited Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Philippine Literature in English, and co-edited, with Eric Gamalinda, Fiippin’: Filipinos on America, and, with Angel Velasco Shaw, Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999. He writes an online column for Manila’s Philippine Daily Inquirer and teaches creative writing at the City University of Hong Kong, literature at Hunter College, and Tagalog Language and Culture at New York University.

Denize Lauture's poety has appeared in Callaloo, Black American Literature Forum, African Commentary, Drumvoices and Bomb. He has written four volumes of poetry. In Creole: The Blues of the Lightning Metamorphosis, The Curse of Sincerity River's Samba. In English: When the Denizen Weeps, The Black Warrior and Other Poems and children's books: Father and Son (nominated for the 1993 NAACP Image Award), Running the Road to ABC (winner of the 1996 Coretta Scott King Award) and Mother and Daughters.

Willie Perdomo is a prize-winning Nuyorican poet and children's book author. He is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996) Postcards of El Barrio (Isla Negra Press, 2002), and Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax Press, 2003), which received a PEN American Center Beyond Margins Award. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and recently was a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University. He is co-founder/publisher of Cypher Books and teaches in New York City.

Bino A. Realuyo is the author of The Umbrella Country, a novel, and The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, a poetry collection. His works have appeared in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, New Letters, and several anthologies. For the past fifteen years, he has worked as an Adult Educator and Community Organizer in underserved communities in New York City. He can be found on the web at binoarealuyo.com. He recently founded a social enterprise for low-skilled, low-wage immigrant workers, We Speak America.

Melissa Roxas is a Filipino American poet who has won fellowships from PEN USA Rosenthal Emerging Voices and Kundiman. She is co-founder of Habi Ng Kalinangan, a Los Angeles-based Filipino cultural organization dedicated to promoting community empowerment and progressive social change. In May 2009, while on a medical mission in Tarlac, Philippines, she was abducted at gunpoint and held against her will for six days until her surfacing in Quezon City. She campaigns today for the safety of activists in the Philippines.

Yolaine M. St. Fort is a writer of Haitian descent. In 2000, she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from Long Island University. Her thesis was a novel titled My Shadows in the Mirror. She’s had her prose and poetry published in Downtown Brooklyn, Prose Ax, Calabash, Vwa: Poems for Haiti, Poetry in Performance, General Authority: Earthquake 2010, For The Crowns Of Your Heads: Poems For Haiti, and The Caribbean Writer (forthcoming) . She has also written a second novel titled Hear Their Echoes. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories and a poetry manuscript. She teaches English at Edward R. Murrow High School and sometimes adjuncts at Long Island University. She is the adviser for the school’s literary magazine called The Magnet.

Edwin Torres is a recepient of poetry fellowships from The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and The Poetry Fund and his CD Holy Kid was part of The Whitney Museum's exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. Edwin is currently co-editing POeP! an eJournal, and Cities Of Chance: An Anthology of New Poetry from The United States and Brazil, both from Rattapallax Press.

Free and Open to the Public. Sponsored in part by Ports Out Loud
See website for full details: www.turningtides.squarespace.com


Poets Out Loud Prize Deadline

Monday, November 15, 2010

The POL Prize awards $1,000 and publication to a full-length poetry manuscript. For the first time this year, two volumes will be published by Fordham University Press.

Judge: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
For more information and guidelines go to: www.fordham.edu/pol
To submit online, go to: pol.submishmash.com/Submit

CONTACT:
Poets Out Loud
Fordham University
113 W. 60th Street, Room 924i
New York, NY 10023
(212) 636-6792
www.fordham.edu/pol
pol@fordham.edu

Monday, March 29, 2010

Things That No Longer Delight Me

Poet Leslie C. Chang reading from her work on Tuesday, March 23, at Fordham University as part of the Poets Out Loud series.



This year the Poets Out Loud series concludes with a special reading by Edward Hirsch and high school poets, on Wednesday, April 14, at 7 p.m. in the 12th-Floor Lounge, Lowenstein Center, at the Lincoln Center campus. Hirsh is a distinguished poet and director of the Guggenheim Foundation (his latest book, The Living Fire was very favorably reviewed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review on March 28). He will be reading with student poets chosen by the Cristo Rey and LaGuardia schools, and by the GirlsWriteNow program, which pairs at-risk young women and mentors.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Things That No Longer Delight Me

Poet Leslie C. Chang will read from her work on Tuesday, March 23, at 7 p.m., at Fordham University’s Lowenstein Center, 12-Floor Lounge, 113 W. 60th St., in Manhattan, as part of the Poets Out Loud series.

In the Language of the Here and Now

1

After a mid-winter death, I heard my aunts
say, He couldn't pass through that gate.

You are like a Silk Route merchant with
a caravan, in their old idiom; or a minor
official sent to the border regions

to collect a salt tax. Every city has a gate,
the narrow portal between seasons. Difficult to pass.

In unaccustomed light, the daily banishment
of what you knew before, bitter flavors, foreign cold.

Come spring, showers harrow the road,
its shoulder the muted color of an astrakhan coat,
iris in long grass circling weathered milestones.

Forbearance in their words for one arriving
at a new city, seeing the tall embankment, wanting rest.

From Things That No Longer Delight Me
Fordham University Press


See the complete poem at Poetry Daily.