This Thursday at JSC: Poets David Lehman and Anna Maria Hong

The Johnson State College Authors Series is pleased host an evening of poetry with writers David Lehman and Anna Maria Hong this Thursday, Oct. 13, at 5:30 pm in the Stearns Performance Space.  This event is free and open to the public.

Read more about these authors below.

David Lehman

"David Lehman was born in New York City. He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Yeshiva Boys( Scribner, 2009) and When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs  (Nextbook / Schocken, 2009), The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999), The Perfect Murder ( Michigan, 2000), and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). He edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, which appeared from Scribner in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. Lehman teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and continues as the annual anthology's general editor. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 and an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990. He lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York."  -- David Lehman's Web site

Poet John Hollander has said this about Lehman:  "This increasingly impressive poet keeps reminding us that putting aside childish things can be done only wisely and well by keeping in touch with them, and that American life is best understood and celebrated by those who are, with Whitman, both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it."   

Here is a video of Lehman reading his "Poem for Obama."
Here is Lehman discussing and reading from his recent book Yeshiva Boys.

Here is Lehman discussing his Best American Poetry series.
Here is an interview with David Lehman on NPR's Morning Edition, in which he discusses updating The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006).

Here is Lehman's amusing "The Questions of Postmodernsim." 

Anna Maria Hong

From Anna Maria Hong's Institute Fellows page at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study:

Anna Maria Hong writes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and texts for collaborative works. Since 2005, she has been writing a series of sonnets in traditional English and Italian forms as well as more experimental hybrids and departures. Hong is interested in how rigorous form shapes expression and how language pushes back against constraints to create strange, unexpected content. To date, she has written about 60 sonnets, comprising the first of two collections, The Red Box. 



At Radcliffe, Hong will be working on her second volume of sonnets. The Glass Age is informed by two primary images: the hourglass and the glass ceiling/coffin. The first entails notions of linear and cyclical time, while the second concerns the sensing and shattering of invisible, but oddly durable, barriers. A third strand in the collection responds to glass artworks by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Niki de Saint Phalle.



Hong has published her work in the American Book Review, CUE, Exquisite Corpse, Fairy Tale Review, Gargoyle Magazine, the International Examiner,jubilat, New Orleans Review, Poets & Writers, POOL, Quarterly West, theStranger, and other publications. She is the editor of Growing Up Asian American: An Anthology (William Morrow, 1993) and the recipient of residencies from Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Yaddo. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and a BA in philosophy from Yale University. She has taught creative writing at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and at the University of Washington Bothell.

Here is an interview with Anna Maria Hong by The Harvard Gazette.
Here is a poem by Anna Maria Hong called "Medea I / Device."

Read more about the Johnson State College Authors Series here.