Alice Quinn Presents: Together in a Sudden Strangeness—America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic — Zoom Reading

Please join us as we welcome Alice Quinn to discuss the new anthology she began editing as the coronavirus spread across the Unites States. Eight poets published in Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic (Knopf, 2020), will read their work from the anthology and participate in a Q&A. Sarah Arvio, Rick Barot, Stephanie Burt, Timothy Donnelly, Dana Levin, Carl Phillips, Li-Young Lee, and Kamilah Aisha Moon will read.

Tickets are FREE though donations of any level are welcome. Must pre-register to get the Zoom link, which will be emailed at the time of registration. (Please check spam filter!) Please register at:
https://www.writerscenter.org/calendar/quinnpandemicanthology/

ABOUT TOGETHER IN A SUDDEN STRANGENESS

In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives

As the novel coronavirus and its devastating effects began to spread in the United States and around the world, Alice Quinn reached out to poets across the country to see if, and what, they were writing under quarantine. Moved and galvanized by the response, the onetime New Yorker poetry editor and recent former director of the Poetry Society of America began collecting the poems arriving in her inbox, assembling this various, intimate, and intricate portrait of our suddenly altered reality. In these pages, we find poets grieving for relatives they are separated from or recovering from illness themselves, attending to suddenly complicated household tasks or turning to literature for strength, considering the bravery of medical workers or working their own shifts at the hospital, and, as the Black Lives Matter movement has swept the globe, reflecting on the inequities in our society that amplify sorrow and demand our engagement. From fierce and resilient to wistful, darkly humorous, and emblematically reverent about the earth and the vulnerability of human beings in frightening times, the poems in this collection find the words to describe what can feel unspeakably difficult and strange, providing wisdom, companionship, and depths of feeling that enliven our spirits.

CONTRIBUTING POETS:

Julia Alvarez   Sarah Arvio   Jesse Ball   Rick Barot   Ellen Bass  Erin Belieu   Joshua Bennett   Jill Bialosky   Sophie Cabot Black   Traci Brimhall   Stephanie Burt   Ama Codjoe   Catherine Cohen   Elizabeth Coleman   Billy Collins   Nicole Cooley   Peter Cooley   Timothy Donnelly   Cornelius Eady   John Freeman   Forrest Gander   Suzanne Gardinier   Deborah Garrison   Tammy Melody Gomez   Rigoberto Gonzalez   George Green   Linda Gregerson   Eliza Griswold   Julia Guez   Nathalie Handal   Brooks Haxton   Aleksandar Hemon   Edward Hirsch   Jane Hirshfield   Richie Hofmann   Garrett Hongo   Fanny Howe   Didi Jackson   Major Jackson   Fady Joudah   Stephen Kampa   Vincent Katz   Susan Kinsolving   Ron Koertge   John Koethe   Yusef Komunyakaa   Li-Young Lee   Dana Levin   Ada Limón   Dave Lucas   Amit Majmudar   Gail Mazur   Shane McCrae   Maureen McLane   Dante Michaux   Susan Minot   Susan Mitchell   Kamilah Aisha Moon   Jim Moore   Tomás Q. Morin   Laura Mullen   Carol Muske-Dukes   Eileen Myles   D. Nurkse   John Okrent   Kitty O’Meara   Ron Padgett   Sarah Paley   Carl Phillips   Patrick Phillips   Rowan Ricardo Phillips   Katha Pollitt   Dean Rader   ClareRossini   Mary Jo Salter   Grace Schulman   Vijay Seshadri   Diane Seuss   Evie Shockley   Elizabeth Spires   Tess Taylor   Anne Waldman   Rex Wilder   Jenny Xie   Matthew Zapruder