Thursday, June 9:
Dawn Lundy Martin & Ronaldo Wilson

Dawn Lundy Martin is the author of DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books 2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Poetry Prize, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press 2007), winner of the Cave Cavem Prize; and, The Morning Hour, selected in 2003 by C.D. Wright for the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship. Among her many honors include Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grants for Poetry in 2002 and 2006 and the 2008 Academy of American Arts and Sciences May Sarton Prize for Poetry. She is a founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets; co-editor of a collection of essays, The Fire This Time: Young Activists And The New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004); and a founder of the Third Wave Foundation in New York, a national young feminist organization. She is an assistant professor of English in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. Co- founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is a currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke College, and recent guest faculty at The Millay Colony, The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University. He will begin teaching in the Literature Program at U.C. Santa Cruz in Fall 2011.

Featherstone Center for the Arts is honored to be including these award-winning writers in its vibrant, longstanding and ongoing history of supporting African Americans in the Arts.

Thursday, July 21:

Robert Pinsky & Stan Strickland: "An Evening of Poetry & Jazz"

   

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. He received a
B.A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in cr

eative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters.

He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).

He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David (Schocken, 2006); Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry(1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.

Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of traslation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass).

About his work, the poet Louise Glück has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."

From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives.

In 1999, he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).

His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.

Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Stan Strickland

Singer, saxophonist, flutist, actor Stan Strickland has performed throughout the United States, Europe, Scandinavia, the Caribbean, New 

Zealand and the former Soviet Union. In addition to numerous radio and television appearances, Stan has performed in many clubs and concert halls, including Jordan and Symphony Halls in Boston, Carnegie Recital Hall and Town Hall in New York, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. His work has been featured on recordings by Bob Moses, Marty Erlich, Webster Lewis and Brute Force. Stan has performed with jazz greats Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Mann, Danilo Perez, Shirley Scott and Marlena Shaw. Love & Beauty, Stan's new jazz vocal CD, featuring new arrangements of great jazz classics as well as original material, was released by Hawkline Records in 2005.

Stan has opened for Jazz greats Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, and for Barenaked Ladies. He toured South Africa with The Village People, and was a featured soloist with Take Six and the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall.

His acting experience includes the leading roles in the Boston Art Group's production of Harlem Renaissance, Notheastern University's production of Crossing John, and Dr. Sax in a production of Jon Lipsky's play about Jack Kerouac, Maggie's Riff, produced by the Vineyard Playhouse.

Stan has performed and collaborated with over a dozen choreographers including Alvin Ailey, Jose Limon, and Bill T. Jones.

Stan is profiled/featured, (along with Blair Underwood and Lamar Burton), in a new film documentary that was filmed this past spring, entitled Black Man Up.

He has performed at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival for the premiere of Academy Award winning documentary Born into Brothels and at three exclusive fashion/fragrance events for fashion icon Donna Karan.

Stan has a M.A. degree from Lesley College in Expressive Arts Therapy where he is an adjunct professor. He also teaches at Berklee College of Music, Tufts University and Longy School of Music.

Stan is Co-Executive Director of Express Yourself, a multidisciplinary team of professional artists, working in partnership with adolescents in public mental health residential facilities to produce multimedia performances that celebrate the restorative powers of serious art making.

Thursday, July 28: 
Billy Collins

Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. John Updike praised Collins for writing “lovely poems...Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.” But Collins has offered a slightly different take on his appeal, admitting that his poetry is “suburban, it’s domestic, it’s middle class, and it’s sort of unashamedly that.” Collins’s level of fame is almost unprecedented in the world of contemporary poetry: his readings regularly sell out, and he received a six-figure advance when he moved publishers in the late 1990s. He served two terms as the US Poet Laureate, from 2001-2003, was New York State Poet Laureate from 2004-2006, and is a regular guest on National Public Radio programs. Collins has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts and has taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Lehman College, City University of New York. Appealing to both general readers and those who follow contemporary poetry closely, Collins has demonstrated a skill for “building a rare bridge of admiration for his work between [the] serious literary fold and poetry novitiates,” observed Weber.

Billy Collins was born in 1941 in New York City. He earned a BA from the College of the Holy Cross, and both an MA and PhD from the University of California-Riverside. In 1975 he co-founded the Mid-Atlantic Review with Michael Shannon. Though Collins published throughout the 1980s, it was his fourth book, Questions about Angels (1991), that propelled him into the literary spotlight. The collection was selected by poet Ed
Hirsch for the 1990 National Poetry Series. A Publishers Weekly critic applauded the collection’s “strange and wonderful [images]” but believed that the poems—which are often “constricted by the novelty of a unifying metaphor”—”rarely induce an emotional reaction.” In contrast, reviews of Collins’s subsequent work regularly laud his ability to connect with readers. Assessing Picnic, Lightning (1998), Booklist contributor Donna Seaman praised “the warmth of his voice [which] emanates from his instinct for pleasure and his propensity toward humor.” Discussing Picnic, Lightning and its predecessor, The Art of Drowning (1995), John Taylor noted that Collins’ skillful, smooth style and inventive subject matter “helps us feel the mystery of being alive.” Taylor added: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered into the depths.”

Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000) was the first Collins collection published outside the US. It selected work from his previous four books and was met with great acclaim in the UK. Poet and critic Michael Donaghy called Collins a “rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence,” and AL Kennedy described the volume as containing “great verse, moving, intelligent and darkly funny.” Sailing around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), the US version of Collins’s selected, had a tumultuous journey to print. The story, which garnered a front-page slot in the New York Times, originally cast Collins’s first publishers, the University of Pittsburgh Press, in an unfair light, accusing them of refusing to grant rights for poems requested by Random House for inclusion in Sailing around the Room. However, it later emerged that Random House had begun to produce the book without first securing rights from Pitt Poetry Press, a highly unusual move for a major publishing house to make. Dennis Loy Johnson reported on the controversy for Salon, noting that “ultimately it was Random House, not Pitt, that chose to delay the publication of Collins’ selected volume.” The battle between Random House and the University of Pittsburgh Press was public and uncharacteristic of the sleepy world of poetry publishing. When Sailing around the Room was finally published, in 2001, it was met with enthusiastic reviews and brisk sales.

Collins’s next books Nine Horses: Poems (2002), The Trouble with Poetry (2005) and Ballistics (2008) have continued his sales streak by offering more poems that mix humor with insight. Reviewing Nine Horses for the New York Times, Mary Jo Salter commented that Collins’s “originality derives, it seems, from the marriage of a loopy, occasionally surreal imagination…to an ordinary life observed in just a few ordinary words.” She added that “one appeal of the typical Collins poem is that it’s less able to help you memorize it than to help you to remember, for a little while anyway, your own life.” But Collins’s emphasis on writing—and writing “ordinary life” at that—can, for some critics, make his poetry seem pedestrian or one-note. In the Independent, British poet Hugo Williams called the poems in The Trouble with Poetry “diary entries from the
mind’s present tense. Since there is no hiding in this world, we might as well start from where we are and see what happens. In the end, what these poems are about is writing, never the greatest subject.” Others however, and certainly many readers, find Collins a source of warmth, wit and surprisingly sure technique. Jane Holland, for Tower Poetry, wrote of Ballistics: “These poems are written in a drawl (and perhaps intended to be read with one) but with a constantly heightened delivery that I’m convinced would be difficult for most other poets to sustain without flagging—or not without wishing he/she could shift register and become either lyrical or serious for a change.” Other reviewers have noted how Collins’s poems manifest a literal concern for their readers. John Deming in Cold Front Mag talked about Collins’s concern for those reading his poems because “the transmission of poem to head takes place always elsewhere and in silence, in the mysterious space where poems live…Collins lets us access this place with alarming graciousness, and the openness of his voice probably helps account for his popularity.”

Poet Richard Howard has said of Collins: “He has a remarkably American voice…that one recognizes immediately as being of the moment and yet has real validity besides, reaching very far into what verse can do.” Collins has described himself as “reader conscious”: “I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.” Collins further related: “I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.”

Thursday, August, 4:
Tina Chang