An Afternoon with Award-winning Poets Gail Mazur and Matt Miller

Award-winning lyric poets Gail Mazur and Matt Miller will read and talk about their work and the creative writing process on Sunday, October 28 at 3 pm, in the Main Branch of the Concord Free Public Library’s Periodical Room (129 Main Street). This free event kicks off the 27th Season of the Friends’ Poetry at the Library Series. A Q & A session and book-signings with light refreshments follow the reading.

Widely published and recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, Gail Mazur eloquently contemplates in her 7th collection, Forbidden City (University of Chicago, 2018) the relationship of art and life. At the collection's heart is the poet's long marriage to the renowned artist Michael Mazur (1935-2009).

Winner of the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001, the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize, Mazur taught for 20 years as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College MFA Program.

The Founding Director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge which she ran for 29 years, Mazur lives in Cambridge and Provincetown.

Matt Miller, who received the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, the River Styx Microbrew/Microfiction Prize, and Iron Horse Review's Trifecta Poetry Prize, will read from his 3rd collection, The Wounded for the Water (Salmon Poetry, 2018), hailed as a “beautiful, sublime lesson on the art of drowning, the wonder of living, and the scars that act as memory,” and for its poems that evoke “echoes of Hopkins, coupled with a tender directness and images of clinical grit.”

Miller is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Poetry at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Born and raised in Lowell, MA, Miller earned his BA from Yale. He teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy and lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire.