Smith College Archives - Literary Massachusetts

Boutelle-Day Poetry Center Poetry Reading: Gail Mazur ’59

Literary MA Research — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 19:08:46 +0000

In her landmark collection Land’s End: New and Selected Poems (The University of Chicago Press, 2020), activist, poet, and Smith College alum Gail Mazur uses descriptive-meditative narratives to weave the past and present together and interrogate loss and art. The National Book Award Citation for Mazur’s 2001 collection They Can’t Take That Away from Me praised her work as “Colloquial as well as eloquent, pitch-perfect no matter how delicate her material… She gives us the exact ‘feel’ of contemporary life in our disquieting republic, the uncanny way in which love, hope, and endurance are shot through by contingency, dread, and estrangement.” Mazur has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and Radcliffe Institute. She currently teaches at Boston University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown where she has served for many years on the Writing Committee.

Gail Mazur’s reading will be livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube on December 7, 2021 at 7 p.m.

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Boutelle-Day Poetry Center Poetry Reading: Bianca Stone

Literary MA Research — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 16:36:40 +0000

Bianca Stone is a writer and visual artist, and the author of four acclaimed books, including a collection of poetry comics, and, most recently, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), which The Kenyon Review praised for its depiction of a “womanhood [that is raw, raging, sad, and beautiful] in which we can find some ... Read more

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Boutelle-Day Poetry Center Poetry Reading: Diana Khoi Nguyen

Literary MA Research — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 14:18:59 +0000

Using complex formal innovations, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018) grapples with her brother’s suicide, gathering lyrical lines into forms that echo and reconstruct the shapes left behind following her brother’s removal of his image from family photos. The Michigan Quarterly Review writes that Nguyen’s poetry and multimedia artistry “implicates a ... Read more

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Boutelle-Day Poetry Center Poetry Reading: Chet’la Sebree

Literary MA Research — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 13:58:39 +0000

Chet’la Sebree, the 2021 Boutelle-Day Poet-in-Residence at Smith College, is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Field Study (FSG Originals, 2021), a genre-defying book that employs Tweets, quotations from Black visionaries, pop-cultural references, and other prose fragments to interrogate race, racism, desire, and Black womanhood. In his award citation for the book’s James Laughlin Award, ... Read more

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Boutelle-Day Poetry Center Poetry Reading: Jenny Johnson

Literary MA Research — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 13:38:35 +0000

In Jenny Johnson’s debut book of poetry, In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017), she unpacks the queerness of the natural world as a means to rethink and blur the boundaries between what is real and imagined. In doing so, the reader is able to think through the way in which sexuality and gender norms have been crafted by human conceptions and what is determined as ‘natural.’ Johnson holds numerous accolades, including a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, an NEA Fellowship, as well as scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop and Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.

Jenny Johnson’s reading will be live and in-person in Weinstein Auditorium for members of the Smith community participating in the college’s Covid testing program. It will also be livestreamed for all on Facebook and YouTube on October 19, 2021 at 7 p.m.

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