Poetry at the Library: Brian Burt and Quintin Collins

Join us for an in-person afternoon with award-winning poets Concord resident Brian Burt and Boston-based Quintin Collins who will read from their recent collections and engage in a Q & A about craft, influences, and their writing lives. The event will take place in the Goodwin Forum at the Main Library at 129 Main Street from 3:00 - 4:30 PM on Sunday, November 20. Library doors (on Sudbury Road) will open at 2:40 for this program. Books can be purchased before and after the reading. Conversation, light refreshments, and book signings to follow.

[Register here for a seat in the Forum]

Photographer, technical writer, bicycling aficionado, Nordic ski enthusiast, and dog lover, Brian Burt is the author of two books of poems: Past Continuous (2015) and Black Dog Day (2022). Poet and editor Kirun Kapur has praised Black Dog Day as "a book of modern pastorals, reminding us that even in the time of iPhones and plagues, the land and the word can still replenish the spirit." Past Continuous was described by critic Sven Birkerts as "redemptive" with poems "conveying their intelligence through clarity and the felt rightness of their every small decision."

Burt’s poems have appeared in a variety of print and online publications, including The Independent, The Drum, FUSION, The Hiram Poetry Review, and The Spoon River Quarterly. He is a recipient of the Michael R. Gutterman Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the New American Poetry Prize in 2012. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with his family plus two black cats and a big black dog. View his photography at https://brianburtphoto.com.

Quintin Collins is a writer, editor, and assistant director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. His first full-length collection of poems, The Dandelion Speaks of Survival (2021) was a finalist for the Alice James Award. Poet and editor Dzvinia Orlowsky called it “revelatory, dazzling with wit and wisdom as it dismantles racism and a faltering America.”

Collins’s second collection, Claim Tickets for Stolen People (2022) was selected by Marcus Jackson as winner of The Journal's 2020 Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize.

“Collins’s poetry brings inner life into focus. Blackness is reclaimed, celebrated, embodied. He can be furious, funny, and fatherly in a single poem, with a range as broad as his compassion,” writes Terrance Hayes, National Book Award Winner in Poetry.

Collins’s work appears in many print and online publications, such as Sidereal Magazine, Superstition Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Solstice Literary Magazine, and others. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, the 2019 Atlantis Award from the Poet's Billow, and a finalist for the 2020 Redivider Beacon Street Prize, his publishing accolades include multiple Best of the Net Nominations. Collins spent nearly six years in the digital marketing field as a writer, section editor, and managing editor. See more of his work on qcollinswriter.com.

For more information, please visit www.concordlibrary.org.