jubilat/Jones Poetry Reading
Aracelis Girmay,
Zach Savich,
&
Evie Shockley
Sunday, February 5, 2012 at 3:00 pm
Trustees Room
Jones Library
Meet the Poets: An informal Q&A session will follow each reading.
All events are free and open to the public.
Aracelis Girmay is the author of Kingdom Animalia, which was recently nominated for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle award. She was born and raised in Southern California, with roots in Puerto Rico, Eritria, and African America. She is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing, and the poetry collection Teeth, for which she was awarded a GCLA New Writers Award. Girmay has taught youth writing workshops in schools and community centers for the past ten years. She is assistant professor of poetry writing at Hampshire College, and also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University in New Jersey. Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow and an Acentos board member.
Zach Savich is the author of three books of poetry, including The Firestorm, and a book of ardent prose, Events Film Cannot Withstand. His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, Omnidawn's Chapbook Award, and other honors and has appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, A Public Space, Gulf Coast, and jubilat. A graduate of the UMass MFA Program for Poets and Writers, he teaches at Shippensburg University and serves as an editor with The Kenyon Review.
Evie Shockley is the author of four collections of poetry - the new black (Wesleyan 2011) and a half-red sea(Carolina Wren Press 2006) - and two chapbooks, as well as the critical study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa 2011). Her poems and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as Callaloo, The Nation, Cura, TriQuarterly Online, Mandorla, Contemporary Literature, Black Nature: A Century of African American Nature Poetry, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, and Home is Where: An Anthology of African American Poets from the Carolinas. Shockley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing.
If you have questions, please call the jubilat office at 413/577-1064.
Sponsored by the
Friends of the Jones Library, jubilat,
the Juniper Initiative of the UMass MFA Program for Poets & Writers,
and Factory Hollow Press.
This program is also supported in part by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
The jubilat/Jones Series showcases established and emerging poets in a number of readings each year.
This page last updated on January 24, 2012.