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Poetry of Witness Panel (2017)
- 1386 reads
Poetry of Witness: Where the Personal Meets the Political — A Panel Discussion on Writing and Witnessing in an Age of Resistance with Carolyn Forché, Major Jackson, Charles Simic, & Nicole Sealey and host Chard deNiord
In response to the question of how to take ultimate responsibility for each other—a question posed by Carolyn Forché in the introduction to her and Daniel Wu’s seminal anthology The Poetry of Witness —this panel of poets and writers at this year’s Brattleboro Literary Festival will engage in a discussion on just how this question resounds on their work in the context of today’s political climate and each panel member’s individual life.
Carolyn Forché ’s books of poetry include Blue Hour , The Angel of History , and The Country Between Us. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She lives in Maryland with her husband.
Major Jackson is a professor and the author of four collections of poetry, including his latest collection, Roll Deep , which won the 2016 Vermont Book Award. He lives in Burlington, Vermont.
Charles Simic was born in the former Yugoslavia in 1938. He is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End. His latest book of poetry is The Lunatic . He served as United States Poet Laureate from 2007 to 2008. Simic has been a U.S. citizen since 1971 and lives in New Hampshire.
Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast , forthcoming in fall 2017, 29 and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named. She is the executive director at the Cave Canem Foundation.
Recorded at Brooks Memorial Library on October 15, 2017 by Maria Dominguez.
