Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

As writers and poets, we often wonder: who is this porous and gullible and hungry person writing my poems, who is feeding her and is she for real? Is it truly me who wrote this? Is that my story, my voice? Why don’t I sound like myself—or worse, why does my self sound…not quite right? These questions can be painful, discouraging, silencing. Let’s move beyond them and go deeper into the real mysteries, the useful ones, the ones that help us write and propel us further into our journey as writers. We’ll look at why some “first words” last, what trusting your voice means, and how inchoate feelings can be transformed into art.

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of five poetry books, including The Octopus Museum (Knopf 2019), a New York Times Notable Book. A new collection, Tanya, is forthcoming in 2023, and Liquid Flesh: New and Selected Poems will appear in the UK from Bloodaxe (Fall 2022). Recipient of a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. 

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Join acclaimed poets Andrea Cohen and Fady Joudah reading from recent work and talking about their practice.

Andrea Cohen reads from Everything (Four Way Books, 2021) – poems that traffic in wonder and woe, in dialogue and interior speculation. Humor and gravity go hand in hand here. “A work of great and sustained attention, true intelligence, and soul,” praises Christian Wiman.  Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Her other collections include Nightshade (Four Way, 2019), winner of the 2020 American Fiction Book Award for Contemporary Poetry, Unfathoming (Four Way, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer's Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999). Cohen has received a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at The MacDowell Colony. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

Fady Joudah reads from Tethered to Stars (Milkweek Editions, 2021.) With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human. Joudah’s other collections include Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (Milkweed Editions, 2018), Textu (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), Alight (Copper Canyon, 2013), and The Earth in the Attic (Yale University Press, 2008.) He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.