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.