Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar 2

Enjoy a Poetry Month Celebration with local award-winning authors Karen Skolfield, Oliver de la Paz, and Andrea Cohen. The program will feature a reading from each of the poets, followed by a discussion and Q & A. Karen Skolfield will share an excerpt from Battle Dress: Poems, which recently won the Massachusetts Book Award for poetry. Honorees Oliver de la Paz (The Boy in the Labyrinth) and Andrea Cohen (Nightshade) will read from their books.

About the Books:
Battle Dress: Poems by Karen Skolfield: In a poetic voice at once accessible and otherworldly, gutsy and insightful, U.S. Army veteran Karen Skolfield offers a rare glimpse of a female soldier's training and mental conditioning. Through the narratives of a young soldier, her older counterpart, and her fellow soldiers, Skolfield searches for meaning in combat preparation, long-term trauma, and the way war is embedded in our language and psyche.

The Boy in the Labyrinth by Oliver de la Paz: In a long sequence of prose poems, questionnaires, and standardized tests, The Boy in the Labyrinth interrogates the language of autism and the language barriers between parents, their children, and the fractured medium of science and school.

Nightshade by Andrea Cohen: The poems in Andrea Cohen's Nightshade, her sixth full-length collection, are constructed from the wisdom of loss--of lovers and loved ones and a world gone awry. Cohen builds a short poem the way a master carpenter does a tiny house, in lines that are both economic and precise, with room enough for sorrow and wit to exist comfortably in their spaces.

About the Poets:
Karen Skolfield’s book Battle Dress (W. W. Norton) won the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award in poetry and the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her book Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry, and she is the winner of the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry from The Missouri Review. Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; she’s the poet laureate for Northampton, MA for 2019-2022. Learn more: https://karenskolfield.com/

Oliver de la Paz is the author of five collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth which was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. He also co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A founding member, Oliver serves as the cochair of the Kundiman advisory board. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. His work has been published in journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the LowResidency MFA Program at PLU. Learn more: https://www.oliverdelapaz.com/

Andrea Cohen's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Her seventh poetry collection, Everything, was recently published by Four Way Books. Other recent books include Nightshade and Unfathoming. Cohen directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA. Learn more: https://www.andreacohen.org/

This event is sponsored by the Billerica Public Library Foundation.
Presented in collaboration with libraries in Tewksbury, North Reading, and Chelmsford.

Bruce Weigl is the author, editor or translator of over thirty books of poetry, poetry in translation, critical essays, and prose. His most recent poetry collection, On the Shores of Welcome Home, won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2019. This year BOA will also publish a collection of his short prose, Among Elms, in Ambush, and the Writers Association Publishing house in Ha Noi, Vietnam will publish his co-translation of Slaughterhouse, a book-length poem by Nguyen Quang Thieu, one of Vietnam’s most important writers.

Cammy Thomas’ first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete Inscriptions. Her third collection, Tremors, is forthcoming in 2021. All are published by Four Way Books. Her work appeared recently in the anthology, Poems in the Aftermath. Two of her poems under the title Far Past War were set to music by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas. The work will premiere in 2022. Cammy lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

To sign up for this Zoom reading, contact hguran@aol.com