TICKETS: $5 general admission tickets on sale 12 pm Tuesday, January 28, 2025
DETAILS AND HOW TO WATCH: This is an online rebroadcast of Jennifer Chang & Naomi Shihab Nye live event as part of the 2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. This online event will be accessible from the Inprint website. Details on how to access the reading will be provided to season subscribers. Those who purchase general admission tickets for this rebroadcast event will be provided the viewing link on their Eventbrite email receipt in the “Additional Information” section.
Jennifer Chang and Naomi Shihab Nye will read from their poetry collections An Authentic Life and Grace Notes: Poems about Families. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
Jennifer Chang, according to Shelf Awareness, has “a poetic style that is wild, unfettered and unpredictable, yet devastatingly precise in the emotions it dredges up.” Chang is the author of the collections The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award and was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Chang joins us to read from and talk about her new collection An Authentic Life which, with Chang’s signature meditative urgency, offers a bold examination of a world influenced by war and patriarchy. Natasha Tretheway calls the new collection “a piercing meditation, rooted in loss and longing, and manifest in dazzling leaps of the imagination.” She serves as co-chair of the advisory board of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to Asian American literature.
Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry is, according to Jane Tanner, “international in scope and internal in focus.” Author and editor of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Transfer, The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air, Everything Comes Next, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East – a National Book Award finalist – and many books for children. Her honors include a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Patterson Poetry Prize, and the Robert Creeley Prize. A former U.S. Young People’s Poet Laureate, she has been featured on two PBS specials: “The Language of Life with Bill Moyers” and “The United States of Poetry.” She joins us with her new collection, Grace Notes: Poems about Families, a collection of 100 never-before-published poems celebrating family and community. “Through this intimate and compassionate exploration of one woman’s life, readers receive an invitation to contemplate human interconnectedness. Beautifully written poetry about the butterfly effect of human experience” (Kirkus starred review). William Stafford says, “She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”
Kevin Prufer‘s ninth poetry collection, The Fears (Copper Canyon Press) received the 2024 Rilke Prize. His new novel is Sleepaway (Acre Books, 2024). He is Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where he also curates the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing great but little known authors to new generations of readers.
