Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens

This annual poetry reading features Connecticut-based poets—

Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi is a poet, comparatist, and Caribbeanist. Her scholarship and poetry focus on marronage, identity, and belonging. Her poetry collection, Love Letter to an Afterlife (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), was a finalist for the 2019 International Latino Book Awards (Best Poetry Book) and the 2019 Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, New Letters, and The New York Times Magazine. She is an associate professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at the University of Hartford. 

Jeff Mock is the author of Ruthless (Three Candles Press, 2010). His poems appear in The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, New England Review, The North American Review, Shenandoah, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA program at Southern Connecticut State University and lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Margot Schilpp, and their daughters, Paula and Leah.

Anita Durkin will give the introductions.

This reading is sponsored by the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens (stevenspoetry.org) with the support of the Elizabeth Park Conservancy (elizabethparkct.org).

For more info, contact: Jim Finnegan – JforJames@aol.com – 860-508-2810

NO RAIN DATE: IF BAD WEATHER, CHECK STEVENSPOETRY.ORG FOR STATUS–IN THE EVENT WE MUST CANCEL WE’LL TRY TO RESCHEDULE LATER IN THE SUMMER.

The Twenty-Ninth Annual
WALLACE STEVENS BIRTHDAY BASH
Saturday, November 2, 2024, 2:00pm
Center for Contemporary Culture
Hartford Public Library

Featuring guest speaker—

CHARLES BERNSTEIN

RECORDING OF…
“Ocular Truth and the Actuarial Imagination: Wallace Stevens’s Not So Plain Senses of Things”

Charles Bernstein’s collections of essays include: Pitch of Poetry (U. of Chicago, 2016), Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (Chicago, 2011), My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999), A Poetics (Harvard, 1992). His books of poetry include Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, 2021) The Course, with Ted Greenwald (Roof Books, 2020), Near/Miss (Oct. 2018), Recalculating (Chicago, 2013), All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (FSG, 2010), Girly Man (Chicago, 2006), With Strings (Chicago, 2001), and Republics of Reality: 1975 – 1995 (Sun & Moon, 2000). In 2019, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. His libretto Shadowtime, for composer Brian Ferneyhough, was published in 2005 by Green Integer; it was performed as part of the 2005 Lincoln Center Festival. Bernstein is the editor of several collections, including: American Poetry after 1975 (Duke University Press / special issue of boundary, 2009), Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford, 1999), The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (Roof, 1990), and the poetics magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, whose first issue was published in 1978. He is editor of the Electronic Poetry Center and co-director (with Al Filreis) of PennSound.

Program: This festive and illuminating event will begin with a reception of wine and hors d’oeuvres, followed by Charles Bernstein’s presentation, and will conclude with a book signing, birthday cake and champagne!

Suggested donation $10* per person to benefit…

Hartford Public Library
500 Main Street
Hartford, CT 06103

RSVP—
Jim Finnegan
jforjames@aol.com
860-508-2810

*Completely optional; no one turned away.

This event is presented by—
Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens (stevenspoetry.org)
and Hartford Public Library (hplct.org)

Come to Elizabeth Park for a poetry reading and a stroll through the famous rose gardens…

2024 ROSE GARDEN READING featuring three Connecticut-based poets…

Saturday, June 15, 1PM Under the Tent in Elizabeth Park, Hartford, Connecticut

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of two poetry books: the full-length collection Common Grace (Beacon Press, 2022) and Ubasute, winner of the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. His honors include a MacDowell Stanford Calderwood Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Plume Poetry, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, Pirene’s Fountain, Salamander, Cave Wall, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University.

Frederick-Douglass Knowles II is an Educator and Activist fervent in achieving community augmentation through the literary arts. He is a Professor of English at Three Rivers Community College in his native city of Norwich, CT and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Hartford. He is the recipient of the Nutmeg Poetry Award and the Connecticut of the Arts Fellow in Artist Excellence for Poetry/Creative Non-fiction. Knowles is a Pushcart prize nominee and the author of BlackRoseCity.

Cristina J. Baptista is a first-generation Portuguese-American educator, writer, and author of the poetry collections Taking Her Back (2021), which was a 2022 Connecticut Book Awards Finalist; and The Drowning Book (2017). Her work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, The Cortland Review, CURA,3Elements Literary Review, and elsewhere. Cristina has a Ph.D. in English from Fordham University and is a literature teacher at a private school in Connecticut. https://www.cristinajbaptista.com

2023 and 2024 Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize and Scholarship winners, Asia Hamilton and Shammia Martin, will be invited to read a poem.

Anita Durkin will give the introductions.

This reading is sponsored by the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens (stevenspoetry.org) with the support of the Elizabeth Park Conservancy (elizabethparkct.org).

For more information, contact: Jim Finnegan – JforJames@aol.com – 860-508-2810

May 8, at 7PM, Richard Deming will give an online Reading and Talk.

This is a special online event. Zoom Link, click to Register.

Richard Deming is an award-winning poet and critic, whose work explores the intersections of literature, philosophy, and visual culture. He is the author of six books, including This Exquisite Loneliness (Viking, 2023), Day for Night (Shearsman, 2016) and Art of the Ordinary (Stanford UP, 2018). He teaches in the English Department at Yale University, where he is Director of Creative Writing.

A presentation of the new book Perennial Earth by Wallace Stevens scholar John Serio with paintings by his daughter, the artist Alexis Serio. Zoom video link (12.12.2023).
To order contact Alexis via her website: alexisserioart.com

The Twenty-Eighth Annual

WALLACE STEVENS BIRTHDAY BASH

Saturday, November 4, 2023, 2:00pm

The Lyceum, 227 Lawrence St., Hartford, CT

ANNA MARIA HONG

“How to Live. What to Do: An Episodic Primer”
Video Recording Here

Anna Maria Hong is the author of three recent books: Age of Glass,winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize, and Fablesque,winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her poetry, fiction, and essays appear in publications including The Nation, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Shenandoah, The Hopkins Review, Colorado Review, Fairy Tale Review, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, and The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays. Her awards include a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship.