Special Benefit Reading: Martha Collins, Fred Marchant, and Alan Shapiro

Please join us for the last reading of Spring 2020 as we benefit the reading series of HVWC.

Tickets are $25 for this special benefit and can be purchased in advance at:
https://www.writerscenter.org/calendar/collinsmarchantshapiro/

Martha Collins’ tenth book of poetry, Because What Else Could I Do, was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in fall 2019. Her previous books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day  (Milkweed, 2018 & 2014), and three works that focus on race and racism: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006).

Blue Front, a book-length poem based on a lynching the poet’s father witnessed as a child, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library; both Blue Front and White Papers won Ohioana awards. Collins’ other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, and residency grants from the Lannan Foundation, the Siena Art Institute, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Women’s International Study Center.

An active translator, Collins has also published four volumes of co-translations from the Vietnamese and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017). She also co-edited (with Prufer and Martin Rock) Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of an American Master (2015), and a volume of essays on the poet Jane Cooper (Michigan, 2019, with Celia Bland).

Born in Nebraska and raised in Iowa, Collins was educated at Stanford University and the University of Iowa. She founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and for ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in 2010, and currently teaches (and is available for) short-term workshops. Editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry. His most recent collection, Said Not Said (Graywolf Press), earned an “Honors” designation in the 2017 Massachusetts Book Awards. Earlier books include Full Moon Boat, House on Water, House in Air,and The Looking House. His first book, Tipping Point, won the 1993 Washington Prize, from The Word Works, and was reissued in a 20th anniversary second edition. Marchant has co-translated works by several contemporary Vietnamese poets, and has edited Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford. An emeritus professor of English, he is founding director of the Suffolk University Poetry Center in Boston, and is the winner of the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club, given to poets “whose work is an inspiration to other writers.”Alan Shapiro was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1952 and graduated from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Alan Shapiro has published over ten poetry collections, including Life Pig (University of Chicago Press, 2016); Reel to Reel (University of Chicago Press, 2014); Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), a finalist for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize and National Book Award; and Old War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), winner of the Ambassador Book Award. Shapiro’s poetry is steeped in the drama and loss of domestic life, traversing the line between the public and private spheres.

A memoirist, essayist, translator, and novelist, as well as a poet, Shapiro has also authored the memoirs Vigil (University of Chicago Press, 1997) and The Last Happy Occasion (University of Chicago Press, 1996). He published his first novel, Broadway Baby (Algonquin Books), in 2012.

Shapiro has received the Kingsley Tufts Award, an Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship, the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., the Sarah Teasdale Award from Wellesley College, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Since 1995, Shapiro has taught at the University of North Carolina, where he currently serves as the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing.