Gregory Pardlo, Edgar Kunz, & Soham Patel (in person)

Please join us IN PERSON at HVWC as we welcome Gregory Pardlo, Edgar Kunz, & Soham Patel to read from their latest poetry collections!

Gregory Pardlo‘s collection Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Pardlo is also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir in essays, and Totem. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His other honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Pardlo is poetry editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, codirector for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University, and a visiting associate professor of practice in Literature & Creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi.

On Pardlo’s Spectral Evidence: Poems (Knopf, January 2024):

Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (“flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons”); and more.

Gregory Pardlo is teaching a small master class to the first 10 students who register. Click HERE to learn more & register for the class before it’s full!

Edgar Kunz is the author of two poetry collections: Fixer, published by Ecco in 2023 and named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, and Tap Out, published by Ecco in 2019. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, APR, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

On Kunz’s Fixer (Ecco, August 2023):

“Edgar Kunz is the real deal. Hard-nosed, hard-edged, and hard on his craft, he first caught us slipping with Tap Out–and now, before we could fully recover, he’s followed up with the haymaker that is Fixer. Story, lyric, tight rhythms and taut lines. Intellect, heart. It’s all here. Fans of Philip Levine, Denis Johnson, or Dorianne Laux will find in these poems reason to smile—even through tears—knowing that the tradition of the working class American lyric is in strong hands. This book is a god damned knock out.” — John Murillo

Soham Patel is the author of afar from afar (The Accomplices, 2018), ever really hear it (Subito Press, 2018), winner of the Subito Prize, and All One in the End–/ Water (Delete Press, 2023). She is an assistant editor of The Georgia Review, where she also manages the book review section. Patel is also a Kundiman fellow and a poetry editor at Fence. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, an MA in English from Western Washington University, and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee where she served for four years as a poetry editor at Cream City Review.

On Patel’s All One in the End– /Water (Delete Press, September 2023):

“Like Lorine Niedecker, who was born by and sworn to the Rock River, Soham Patel takes water as her teacher in this study of bonds, of what ties us to each other in this world in which ‘our narrative is not ours alone.’ Pieced together like a daybook, paced like a travel journal, this book tracks a migratory life of ‘departures, arrivals, departures.’ Its disparate modes and voices are united in their concern with place, poetry, relation, and ethics–and the Great Lakes are never far away, either. While it critiques capitalism, empire, and settler colonialism, All One In The End—/Water also offers a record of complicities acknowledged and responsibilities taken. Its gracious pages honor the fluid bonds of sexuality and family, friendship and care, culminating in the kind of wild hopefulness only poetry can offer.”— Brian Teare