AWARD-WINNING POETS FANNY HOWE & KATIE PETERSON READ @ WEST TISBURY LIBRARY
Thursday August 23 @ 5pm, summer resident Fanny Howe and visiting writer Katie Peterson will close the summer season with a reading. Refreshments will be served. Free & open to the public.
In her artist’s statement, Katie Peterson explains, “…I like a poem in which all of my intelligence fails. I am forced to use other tools: desire, anger, recklessness. I pursue beauty and memory not to preserve them but to try, against odds, to preserve that perishable pursuit.” Peterson’s debut poetry collection, This One Tree (2006), was awarded the New Issues Poetry Prize by judge William Olsen. Peterson has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Summer Literary Seminars and received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She has taught at Bennington College and Deep Springs College and she is currently professor of the practice and interim director of creative writing in the English Department at Tufts University.
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Fanny Howe is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose and the winner of countless awards. Poet Michael Palmer has commented: "Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the "city on a hill". Writes Emerson, The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. Here's the luminous and incontrovertible proof." In an interview with the Kenyon Review, Howe said of her own work, “If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone’s notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.” Howe currently lives in West Tisbury and will be teaching at UMass Boston in the fall.
The West Tisbury library is thrilled to be hosting this dynamic duo!