Headliners and Other Poetry Lovers at the MPF! | Mass Poetry ...

A social media for poets and poetry lovers!

Today it begins!

Not only are you going to see and hear some of the best poets in the country (see our list below), you are going to meet people who ? given?your mutual interest in poetry ??could become your lifelong friends.

If you?ve been to our master schedule site?for the Massachusetts Poetry festival, you?ll note it is set up to promote friendship among local poetry lovers. You can schedule not only?festival events, but meetings with friends?who are also at the festival ? maybe?that poet you met at Breadloaf four years ago and promised to keep up with.

Or you can stop in a local cafe or restaurant and start talking to anyone close by.? Chances are that person will be a poetry lover ? and a potential new friend who maybe lives only a few miles from you.? Maybe you?ll decide to start a poetry book club. Or start a reading series in your local library. Or meet together monthly to critique each other?s poems.? Or maybe you?ll just smooze!

Headliners?who can start your smoozing conversations!

Meanwhile, here is a list of the headliner programs for each day of the festival?? programs that will draw hundreds of poety-ophiles, all as eager to enjoy the event as you are.

Friday night

The Friday night event will be at 7:30 in the Atrium of the Peabody Essex Museum. And here is its star-studded program:

Robert Pinsky?s first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism, and such national enthusiasm in response, that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. As poet laureate, Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans?of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state?shared their favorite poems.? Pinsky?s own poems have earned praise for their wild musical energy and ambitious range. Selected Poems, (spring 2011) is his most recent volume of poetry. His The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union.? Pinsky has released a new CD this month with award-winning pianist Laurence Hobgood. POEMJAZZ treats a voice speaking poetry as having a role like that of a horn. POEMJAZZ is a conversation between the sounds of poetry and music.

Maggie Dietz?s first book of poems, Perennial Fall (University of Chicago Press), won the 2007 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. For many years she directed the Favorite Poem Project, Robert Pinsky?s special undertaking during his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate, and is coeditor of three anthologies related to the, most recently An Invitation to Poetry. Her awards include the Grolier Poetry Prize, the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared widely in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni, Harvard Review and Salmagundi. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and is assistant poetry editor for the online magazine Slate. Dietz lives in New Hampshire with her husband, the poet Todd Hearon, and their four-year-old twins.

Major Jackson?is an American poet, professor and the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Hoops (W.W. Norton, 2006), both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry and Leaving Saturn?(University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. He is also a recipient of a Whiting Writers? Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell and currently serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

Saturday night

The saturday night reading will also be at 7:30 in the Atrium of Peabody Essex Museum. Here are the headliners:

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. Her seven books of poetry, which includes such well-known titles as How We Became Human- New and Selected Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses have garnered many awards. For A Girl Becoming, a young adult/coming of age book, was released in 2009 and is Harjo?s most recent publication. She has released four award-winning CD?s of original music and in 2009 won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year for Winding Through the Milky Way. Her most recent CD release is a traditional flute album: Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears.

Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the civil rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff?s Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997), edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney?s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split was awarded the National Book Award for poetry.

Wesley McNair Phillip Levine has called Wesley McNair ?one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.? The author of? six volumes of poetry, McNair?s latest book is Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems. He has been awarded grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship in literature, and two NEA fellowships. In 2006 he was selected for a United States Artists Fellowship of $50,000 as one of ?America?s finest living artists.? Other honors include the Devins Award for Poetry, the Jane Kenyon Award, the Robert Frost Award, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry magazine, an Emmy Award, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal. A guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology, McNair?s work has appeared on NPR?s Weekend Edition and The Writer?s Almanac, with Garrison Keillor; two editions of The Best American Poetry; and more than sixty anthologies. He has served four times on the nominating committee for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and has authored or edited 18 books, including poetry, nonfiction, and anthologies.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of two poetry books, Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003). His honors include a 2011 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a 2011 Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship for Literature, a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award and a Whiting Writers Award. He is originally from Baa?oogeed? (White Cone, Arizona on the Navajo Nation). He is Din? of the Todich??i?nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the T!??z?!?n? (Many Goats Clan).

Sunday Afternoon

The culminating event for headliner poets will be at 3:00 in the East India Marine Hall of the Peabody Essex Museum.

Frank Bidart?s first books, Golden State and The Book of the Body, both published in the 1970s, gained critical attention and praise, but his reputation as a poet of uncompromising originality was made with The Sacrifice, published in 1983. All three books are collected In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-1990. His position in American letters has been solidified through his later works, including Desire, Star Dust, and Watching the Spring Festival. Desire was nominated for the triple crown of awards?the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award?and received the 1998 Rebekka Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress for the best book of poetry published during the previous two years. Bidart?s honors include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader?s Digest Foundation Writer?s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review?s first Bernard F. Conners Prize for ?The War of Vaslav Nijinsky? in 1981. In 2007, Bidart received the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.

Martha Collins?is the author of White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), as well as the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award and was chosen as one of ?25 Books to Remember from 2006? by the New York Public Library. Collins has also published four earlier collections of poems and two collections of co-translated Vietnamese poetry. Her other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes and a Lannan Foundation residency fellowship. Founder of the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College until 2007, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.

Stephen Dunn is the author of 16 collections of poetry, including the recent? Here and Now and What Goes On: Selected & New Poems 1995?2009. Different Hours won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and Loosestrife was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in 1996. His other W.W. Norton books are New & Selected Poems: 1974?1994, Landscape at the End of the Century, Between Angels, and Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs. Local Time (William Morrow & Co.) was a winner of The National Poetry Series in 1986. A new and expanded edition of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry, was issued by BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2001.The winner of many awards and fellowships, Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, but spends most of his time these days in Frostburg, Maryland, where he lives with wife the writer Barbara Hurd.

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