DAWN LUNDY/MARTIN
is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of five books of poems: Instructions for The Lovers, Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was the first person to hold the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh where she co-founded and directed the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is currently working on memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books. She is Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS
works with poetry and prose as a writer, editor, translator, publisher, teacher, and designer. Her forthcoming novel, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, will be published in November 2024 by Soft Skull. Her most recent book is Participation (2022), a precarious novel about love & comradeship, the discomforts of desire, forms and functions of labor, and the embodied experience of reading and being read. Other books include the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, and poetry books They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent translation is of David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood Is Black (Frère d’âme), for which she and Diop received the 2021 International Booker Prize. She has also translated Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, Bresson on Bresson, and (with Christine Schwartz-Harley) Marcelle Sauvageot’s Commentary. She is a student of plants and herbalism, a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, and a co-founder of Bushel Collective, an experimental mixed-use storefront space in Delhi, NY. She is currently at work on a novel, a book of essay-poems, an experimental documentary, and a collaborative translation of Mihret Kebede’s #evolutionarypoems, forthcoming from Circumference Books.

MARIANNE SHANEEN
is a writer of fiction, essays, and poetry. She has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, and the Tusen Takk Foundation (2021). She received her MFA in writing from the Bard Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Her fiction “The Mason Jar” was published in The Kenyon Review (Sept/Oct 2020), and her work has appeared in Bomb magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, the book Monstrous Adaptations (Manchester University Press), Vanitas, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Lucent Amnesis was published by Portable Press/Yo-Yo Labs. She has also worked in documentary video, and was awarded a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant for her poetic, playful, provocative video essay exploring fluid identity and trans-species possibility. Recently, Shaneen wrote a text and voiceover for the essay film Kansas Atlas by filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh which screened at the 2020 New York Film Festival and in numerous galleries. Shaneen has been commissioned to write for Henry Gallery in Washington, for the film and installation Bugs and Beasts Before the Law by collaborative duo Bambitchell (2021), as well as for solo shows by artists such as Suzanne Kite (2021), Miruna Dragan, Barbara Ess, and choreographer Rebecca Davis. Shaneen is currently finishing her first novel, Homing.

__

Books are available for purchase and signing.

Created and Hosted by Andrea Kleine.

This event is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

 MORE

Also with…
Lemanja Brown, Russell Day, Katie Fowley, Annabel Lee, John Mason, Emma Parrish Post, Karen Schoemer, Sarah Steadman, and Katie Taylor.

 

A Reading

Hosted by Philip Good

Featuring Ellyn Gaydos, author of Pig Years (Knopf)

Plus Iemanja Brown, Russell Day, Katie Fowley, Annabel Lee, John Mason, Emma Parrish Post, Karen Schoemer, Sarah Steadman, and Katie Taylor
__

Ellyn Gaydos’ first book, Pig Years, came out in 2022 and was a New Yorker best book of the year. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Paris Review and others. She lives in New York with her family and two cats and works on a vegetable farm.

Pig Years catapults American nature writing into the 21st century, and has been hailed by Lydia Davis and Aimee Nezhukumatathil as “engrossing” and “a marvel.” As a farmer in Upstate New York and Vermont, Ellyn Gaydos lives on the knife edge between loss and gain. Her debut memoir draws us into this precarious world, conjuring with stark simplicity the lifeblood of the farm: its livestock and crisp full moons, the sharp cold days lived near to the land. Joy and tragedy are frequent bedfellows. Fields go barren and animals meet their end too soon, but then their bodies become food in a time-old human ritual. Seasonal hands are ground down by the hard work, but new relationships are formed, love blossoms and Gaydos yearns to become a mother. As winter’s dark descends, Pig Years draws us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are star-bright symbols of hope and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, even in the slaughter.

In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor and loss within a landscape given to flux.

__

Poetry State Forest is located at the edge of the Rensselaer Plateau where two creeks meet. It preserves the legacy of renowned poet Bernadette Mayer through programming in her home and writing spaces including her poetry library and the surrounding landscape.

Philip Good, who helped Mayer lead writing workshops for decades, has continued the tradition with local writers who meet once a week to enjoy experimentation in poetry.

__

Books and chapbooks available for purchase.

MORE