The Art of Poetry as Portraiture and Remembrance

Concord MA

22 January, 2022

12:33 PM

Description

The Concord Poetry at the Library Series invites you to join prize-winning poets Moira Linehan and Angela Narciso Torres who will read eloquent and moving poetry from their latest collections and engage in a Q & A about their practice. The event will take place on Sunday, February 6 at 3pm on Zoom. Please register here for the Zoom link. Moira Linehan reads from her fourth book, & Company (Dos Madres 2020), a study of the Impressionist paintings of the fashion worlds in Paris and Boston to imagine the life of her determined, farsighted grandmother who worked at the heart of these places as a dress designer and seamstress. Praised for her rich imagination and superb craft, Linehan references these paintings, at times as background, at times as foreground, to inspire narrative and ekphrastic poems of lasting impressions. Linehan's previous books include Toward (Slant Books 2020), and Incarnate Grace (2015) and If No Moon (2007), both published by Southern Illinois University Press and named Honor Books in Poetry in the Massachusetts Book Awards. If No Moon received the 2006 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Prize selected by Dorianne Laux. Widely published, Moira is the recipient of residencies in Ireland at the Cill Rialaig Project and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre; the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center in WA; and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives in Reading, MA. Angela Narciso Torres reads from her third critically acclaimed book, What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books 2020) – praised by Publisher's Weekly and Booklist and featured on WBUR. Praised by Publisher's Weekly and Booklist. Sutherland Jaramillo reviewing for LatinX Book notes "This is a story of migration, moving between the United States and the Philippines, imprinted by traces of kundimans (traditional Filipino love songs), salvia, guava, native tongue, familial wisdom and superstition, family brought together and separated by sea. Torres... reminds us that being human is a process of molting, of revising." Torres is also the author of Blood Orange (Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry, 2013) and To the Bone (Sundress Publications, 2020). Recent work appears in Poetry, Missouri Review, and Quarterly West. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Torres has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. She won the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York) and has also been featured on Ms. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO Poetry. She lives in Southern California. The Poetry at the Library Series is sponsored by Friends of the Concord Free Public Library.