Katonah Poetry Series Launches Fiftieth Anniversary Season With Reading by Poet Kathleen Ossip

On Sunday, September 25 at 4:00 pm, the Katonah Poetry Series launches its Fiftieth Anniversary Season with a reading by Kathleen Ossip, a favorite on the Westchester and New York City poetry scene. Kathleen Ossip has authored three volumes of poetry, a chapbook of poems on movies (Cinephrastics) and The Status Seekers, a verse play. Her debut collection, The Search Engine (Copper Canyon, 2002) was chosen by Derek Walcott to receive the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. The Cold War (Sarabande Books, 2011) received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and appeared on their 100 Best Books of 2011 list as well as the American Academy of Poets list of Notable Books of 2011. Ossip’s most recent collection, The Do-Over (Sarabande, 2015), was a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

Born and raised in the Albany area, Kathleen Ossip holds an MFA in creative writing/poetry from The New School, where she currently serves on the faculty. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Washington Post, The Believer, A Public Space, and Poetry Review (London). She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and grants from Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Most recently, she has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship for 2016-2017. Ossip is the editor of the poetry review website SCOUT and has also served as poetry editor for Women’s Studies Quarterly and LIT. She is a 20-year resident of Hasting-on-Hudson, and has frequently taught at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center in Sleepy Hollow.

Kathleen Ossip’s books have met with widespread, glowing critical praise. Publishers Weekly called The Cold War “a surprising poetic powerhouse that interweaves the personal and the political in ways that are as aesthetically exciting as they are emotionally rich.” Derek Walcott says of her work in The Search Engine, “The eye is restless and relentless, a detail-devourer, a silent machine that has developed, like a diary, a hunger for subtleties . . . At her acutest she is irresistible.” And Slate calls The Do-Over “remarkable: unusually alive, intelligent and alert; unusually imaginative in its ways of letting the now fall into poems . . . “

Admission is a $10 donation/adult; students free. Doors open at 3:30 pm. For further information and to read interviews with the poets, please visit www.katonahpoetry.com. The Katonah Poetry Series can also be found on Facebook and Twitter. The Katonah Village Library (914-232-3508) is located at 26 Bedford Road, within easy walking distance of the Katonah Metro-North train station. Street parking is available on Sundays.

The Katonah Poetry Series is funded in part by both The Jerome Levy Foundation and Poets & Writers, Inc. with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. KPS is a non-profit program under the auspices of the Katonah Village Library. The Katonah Poetry Series was founded in 1967. KPS readers include ten Poets Laureate of the United States, sixteen winners of the Pulitzer Prize, and ten National Book Award winners. The KPS Fiftieth Anniversary Season will continue on November 20th with Paul Muldoon.