Poetry Night with Kiki Petrosino

Concord MA

03 September, 2021

2:53 PM

Description

The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library and The Friends of the Maynard Public Library are proud to present a poetry reading with poet Kiki Petrosino on Tuesday, September 14 from 7:00—8:00 p.m. Please register here for the Zoom link. What does it mean to be Black in America and to search for one's ancestors? Join us online with poet Kiki Petrosino who will read from and talk about her Rilke-Prize-winning fourth full-length collection, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (Sarabande Books, 2020), that tells the story of her search for answers to these questions. Petrosino digs into her genealogical origins and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. The poems in the collection also touch upon such subjects as DNA test results and the complex history of Monticello. Harvard Review has written "The collection has a searching, yearning momentum that is cut by the wry intellect of a speaker who knows her pursuit of historical meaning remains subject to the same colonial forces that influenced the lives of her ancestors." White Blood is short-listed for the 2021 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, an international award for Black writers. Praise for the book comes from The New York Times, "Poems that Poets Turn to in a Time of Strife"; The New York Times Book Review, "New and Noteworthy"; Library Journal, "Black Voices Matter 2020"; and Publishers Weekly, "An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List, among others. Petrosino is the author of three additional books of poetry: Witch Wife (2017), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013) and Fort Red Border (2009), all also from Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, Tin House and on-line at Ploughshares. Petrosino is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Al Smith Fellowship Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. She teaches at the University of Virginia as a Professor of Poetry. This event is sponsored by The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library and The Friends of the Maynard Public Library. For more information, please visit www.concordlibrary.org.