The annual Poets Out Loud (POL) reading series will celebrate the diversity of New York City in its first event of the academic year.
Poets Nick Laird, John Murillo, and Roger Sedarat will read their original works. Their ethnic diversity embraces the evening’s theme “Let the Great City Spin: 21st Century Poetries in New York.”
Date: Monday, Sept. 24
Time: 7 p.m.
Location: Lowenstein Center, 12th-Floor Lounge, 113 W. 60th St., New York, N.Y.
Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., the Rev. John Boyd, S.J. Chair in Poetic Imagination and director of the POL reading series, said that the first reading was planned in coordination with the orientation program for Fordham’s first-year freshmen.
“This year that program focused on Colum McCann’s novel, Let the Great World Spin (Random House 2009),” said Dubrow. “So we chose this title to allude to his book, and our poets will also include poems about some of the issues in that novel – cities, New York in particular, and ethnicities.”
Laird, author of Glover’s Mistake (Viking Adult, 2009), is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and a native of Ireland. He has won several awards for his poetry and fiction, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
In addition to being the author of the collection, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books, 2010), Murillo is a founding member of The Symphony, an African-American poetry collective. The self-proclaimed Blaxican has received fellowships from The New York Times, Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
Iranian poet, Sedarat teaches creative writing (poetry and literary translation) at Queens College, City University of New York. He also teaches and writes about 19th and 20th century American literature and Middle Eastern-American literature. His book, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic (Ohio University Press, 2007), won Ohio University Press’s Hollis Summers’ Prize. Sedarat is currently working on translating a full-length collection of ghazals (poetic expressions describing loss or beauty of love in spite of pain) by the 14th century Sufi Persian poet, Hafez.
A complete list of this year’s readings can be found on the POL webpage. All readings are free and open to the public.
