Poetry and Conversation with Mary Jo Bang and Rowan Ricardo Phillips (IN PERSON)

Please join us on Sunday, May 5, at 4 PM IN PERSON at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY (Philipse Manor Station) for NEW POETRY and conversation with Mary Jo Bang and Rowan Ricardo Phillips.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poems, including Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest collection is A FILM IN WHICH I PLAY EVERYONE (Graywolf, September 2023.) Her other books include Apology for Want (1997), which was awarded the 1996 Bakeless Prize and the 1998 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award; Louise in Love (2001), which received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress; The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (2001); The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (2004); Elegy (2007), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Bride of E (2009). She was the poetry co-editor at Boston Review from 1995 to 2005. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Berlin Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. She has a B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Northwestern University, a B.A. in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. Her 2012 translation of Dante’s Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was named a Notable Book by both the Academy of American Poets (2012) and by the American Library Association (2013).

Praise for Bang’s A FILM IN WHICH I PLAY EVERYONE (Graywolf, September 2023):

Mary Jo Bang is “an ingenious phrase maker, startling English out of its idiomatic slumber”— The New York Times Book Review

“Many of these poems deal either directly or indirectly with outsiderness—the feeling that someone else is directing your movie… She is suggesting, it seems, that being oneself, and being at peace with the world, can be a good and even necessary alternative to being in power. Then again, why should the two be mutually exclusive? Why should anyone have to choose?”—Liza Katz Duncan, Los Angeles Review of Books

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of seven previous books of poetry, prose, and translation. His most recent collection of poems is SILVER (Macmillian, March 2024.) The recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award, Phillips has been a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and an NAACP Image Award, and has been long-listed for the National Book Award for Poetry. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University and the poetry editor of The New Republic. His book in progress, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America will be published by FSG in 2025. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.

Praise for SILVER (Macmillian, March 2024):

“A collection to ponder in wonder.” —Michael Ruzicka, Booklist

“Musical and erudite, the latest from Phillips offers an extended ars poetica in which poetry is ‘a ritual that the sun organizes/ and arranges’ . . . Readers will take pleasure in this poetical flowering.” —Publishers Weekly

For the months of May & June 2024, attendees of HVWC IN-PERSON Readings will receive ONE contest-winning title from Slapering Hol Press to take home, as a thank you for being part of our in-person community.