RHP at Boston Court

Red Hen Press partners with Boston Court Performing Arts Center, a venue dedicated to presenting works that are creative, bold, and daring. They strive to challenge the audiences of Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley with diverse programs in an intimate setting. Authors who performed at past events include David Mason, winner of the Colorado Book Award with his novel Ludlow, Peggy Shumaker, the Alaska State Writer Laureate, Carl Phillips, whose Pastoral won the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Pulitzer Prize recipients Rae Armantrout and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Boston Court Performing Arts Center
70 North Mentor Avenue
Pasadena, CA

General admission $10
PSA members, students & seniors $5
Click here for advance tickets
or call 626.683.6883

Upcoming Event
March 6, 2012
7 PM

Featuring

B.H. Fairchild is an award-winning American poet whose most recent book, Usher (W.W. Norton, 2009), is his sixth collection. His previous volume, Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (W.W. Norton, 2004), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Art of the Lathe (Alice James Books, 1998), which received the 1997 Beatrice Hawley Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, brought Fairchild’s work to national prominence. His work has won significant awards including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress, the California Book Award, and Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the civil rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky, Finney authored Heartwood (1997), edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split (Triquarterly, 2011) was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry.

Willis Barnstone has received four Pulitzer nominations, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, the W. H. Auden Award of the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Midland Authors Award. He has translated Sappho, Borges, Machado, Neruda, Mao Zedong, St. John of the Cross, Rilke, and many others, as well as the Gnostic Bible and the Restored New Testament. Formerly the O’Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is now Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He divides his time between Bloomington, Indiana, and Oakland, California. His latest collection of poems, Stickball on 88^th Street, was published by Red Hen in 2011.

DeWitt Henry, the founder and longtime editor of Ploughshares, is the author of the memoir, Sweet Dreams: A Family History (Hidden River Press, 2011). He is also the author of Safe Suicide: Narratives, Essays, And Meditations (Red Hen Press, 2008) and the novel, The Marriage Of Anna Maye Potts (University of Tennessee, 2001), winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel. Henry has edited a number of highly praised anthologies including The Ploughshares Reader: New Fiction for the 80s (Pushcart Press, 1984), winner of Third Annual Editors Book Award. A professor at Emerson College, Henry graduated from Amherst College in 1963 and earned an M.A. in English from Harvard University, as well as a Ph.D. in English from Harvard in 1971.

Moderator:

Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor of English at Whittier College and the author of twelve books. His books of poetry include Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry (BKMK Press), and The Golem of Los Angeles, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry (Red Hen Press). He is a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose, including The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor), The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Shambhala), and Chinese Erotic Poems (Everyman). Among his awards are the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, a fellowship from the California Arts Council, the Poets Prize, and a fellowship from the NEA. Recently, he has been working with artist Dorothy Tunnell to make a poetry graphic novel, with artist Alexandra Eldridge to make a poetry deck of cards, and with singer-songwriters John Clinebell and Ariana Hall to put out a CD of original music based on Tongue of War.