Poetry Foundation’s Fall 2017 Events

CHICAGO –Poetry Foundation’s fall events season begins tonight with Collaborative Works Festival’s musical exploration of Greek legends. As the season continues, Kaveh Akbar, Charif Shanahan, Marcus Wicker, Eve L. Ewing, and Erika L. Sánchez will offer work from new collections. Former Poetry editor Christian Wiman returns to Chicago for a reading in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival, and with the International Writing Program, we will host Ali Cobby Eckermann, Kristian Sendon Cordero, and Fatena Alghorra. Poetry and song will be highlighted in the Collaborative Works Festival’s opening concert and in a return recital by Stephen Alltop and Josefien Stoppelenburg. In November, we present the world premiere of Manual Cinema’s No Blue Memories, an exploration of Gwendolyn Brooks’s work through art, shadow puppetry, and music. Kwame Dawes, Matthew Shenoda, and Natasha Trethewey celebrate Romare Bearden’s influence on poets. Olagón, premiering in December, is a collaboration among Eighth Blackbird, composer Dan Trueman, singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, and poet Paul Muldoon. These are just a few of the many exciting Poetry Foundation programs in the new season.

Except when otherwise noted, the following events are free and open to the public on a first come, first served basis at the Poetry Foundation, 61 West Superior Street, Chicago. More information is available at poetryfoundation.org/events. Images are available upon request.

Poetry Foundation Fall 2017 Events

SEPTEMBER

Poetry & Music 
Collaborative Works Festival: Myths & Legends
Wednesday, September 6, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
A reception follows the program. 
The 2017 Collaborative Works Festival of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago (CAIC) opens with a concert exploring the legends of Greek mythology as told through the lens of Franz Schubert and his fellow German Romantic poet contemporaries. The concert will feature many familiar stories of Greek gods, demigods, and goddesses as retold by Schubert and the poets Goethe, Schiller, and Mayrhofer. The evening’s musicians will be CAIC Artistic Director Nicholas Phan, Grammy Award–winning bass-baritone Douglas Williams, pianists Myra Huang and CAIC co-founder Shannon McGinnis, and soprano Sarah Shafer.
Cosponsored with Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago

Poetry off the Shelf 
Kaveh Akbar & Charif Shanahan
Wednesday, September 13, 7:00 PM 
Poetry Foundation
Kaveh Akbar founded and edits Divedapper, where he interviews major voices in contemporary poetry. He is the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (2017) and the new collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He was born in Tehran, Iran, and is teaching at Purdue University this fall. In 2016, Akbar received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (2017), which won the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, he is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Celebration
Fenton Johnson Induction Ceremony
Thursday, September 14, 7:00 PM 
Poetry Foundation 
The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame honors Chicago authors who have made outstanding contributions to literature. Fenton Johnson (1888 – 1958) was born in Chicago into an affluent African American family. Educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, he published his first collection of poetry, A Little Dreaming, in 1913, and went on to issue two more volumes of verse, as well as essays, stories, and plays. He also founded The Champion and The Favorite magazines. Johnson’s poems, which debuted in Poetry in 1918, have been widely anthologized.
Cosponsored with the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame

The Open Door Readings 
Columbia College’s Lisa Fishman with Northwestern University’s Averill Curdy
Tuesday, September 19, 7:00 PM 
Poetry Foundation 
The Library & Gallery are open to the public until 7:00 PM.
The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students. 

Poetry off the Shelf
Fatena Alghorra, Kristian Sendon Cordero & Ali Cobby Eckermann
Wednesday, September 20, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
A reception follows the program.
Palestinian-Belgian poet and Al Jazeera journalist Fatena Alghorra is the author of four books of poetry, including A Very Troublesome Woman (2003). Kristian Sendon Cordero writes and translates in Filipino, Bikol, and Rinconada. Two of his recent collections, Labi (2013) and Canticos: Apat na Boses (2013), received 2014 Philippine National Book Awards. Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann is the author of seven books, including the verse novel Ruby Moonlight (2012), which was published in the United States in 2015 by Flood Editions. She won the 2017 Windham Campbell Prize in Poetry at Yale University.
Cosponsored with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa

Harriet Reading Series
Alli Warren
Thursday, September 21, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
The Harriet Reading Series features talks, performances, and readings by poets who have appeared on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. The series presents both established and emerging poets whose writing finds innovative approaches to the craft of poetry. Alli Warren is the author of I Love It Though (2017) and Here Come the Warm Jets (2013). She lives in El Cerrito, CA.

Poetry off the Shelf 
Matt Bodett
Tuesday, September 26, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
Matt Bodett performs one part of Twelve: a series of performative koans. This performance investigates the schizophrenic experience and its place in a contemporary lexicon. Twelve is a residency project sponsored by Bodies of Work and 3Arts taking place during September and October 2017. Bodett was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2004 and now serves on the advisory board for the Institute for Therapy through the Arts. He teaches in the Fine Arts department at Loyola University Chicago and Northeastern Illinois University. 

Poetry off the Shelf  
Eve L. Ewing & Marcus Wicker
Thursday, September 28, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
Eve L. Ewing is a poet and sociologist who holds a PhD from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Her first collection of poetry, essays, and visual art, Electric Arches, is forthcoming in fall 2017. She co-directs Crescendo Literary, a partnership that develops community-engaged arts events and educational resources. Marcus Wicker is the poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review and an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana. He is the author of Silencer (2017) and Maybe the Saddest Thing (2012), which was selected for the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. His honors include a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize.  

OCTOBER 

Poetry off the Shelf 
Layli Long Soldier
Tuesday, October 3, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
Layli Long Soldier is the author of WHEREAS (2017) and the chapbook Chromosomory (2010). She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and is poetry editor at Kore Press. In 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. A citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, Long Soldier lives in Tsaile, Arizona, in the Navajo Nation, with her husband and daughter. She teaches at Diné College.
Cosponsored with the Writing Program, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Poetry & Music
L’Histoire du Soldat
Thursday, October 5, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
Igor Stravinsky’s early twentieth-century Faustian work tells of a Russian soldier who trades his fiddle to the devil for promised riches. Jenna Lyle, composer, performer, and programs manager at The Arts Club of Chicago, narrates the story as Chris Wild conducts an ensemble of musicians.

Poetry & Music
Stephen Alltop & Josefien Stoppelenburg
Tuesday, October 10, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
Soprano Josefien Stoppelenburg and pianist Stephen Alltop offer a multifaceted program of songs inspired by the immortal poetry of numerous masters. Featuring poetry by May Swenson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, Paul Verlaine, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, and John Greenleaf Whittier in settings by Gwyneth Walker, Dominick Argento, Gabriel Fauré, Charles Ives, Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Alan Terricciano.  

Poetry off the Shelf 
Joyce Carol Oates
Thursday, October 12, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
Joyce Carol Oates returns to the Poetry Foundation to read her poetry. The author of many books, Oates has penned best-selling novels, critically acclaimed collections of short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and memoir. Her remarkable bibliography—which includes work as an editor and anthologist—spans forms, themes, topics, and genres. Writing in The Nation, critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. said, "A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America." In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Oates the National Humanities Medal. 

Poetry & Music
Man Forever & Friends
Friday, October 13, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
Man Forever, a percussion group led by composer and drummer John Colpitts (a.k.a. Kid Millions) and featuring the members of Brooklyn ensemble Tigue along with bassist Brandon Lopez,  perform a collaborative concert with young poets and writers from the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Using compositions, words, and rhythms from Man Forever’s latest album Play What They Want, students from the UC Lab Schools will present unique recitations and work.

Poetry & Sound
Open House Chicago 
Saturday & Sunday, October 14 & 15, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
The Poetry Foundation celebrates Open House Chicago, an annual festival weekend that provides an opportunity to explore Chicago’s rich architecture, culture, and history by visiting featured sites and neighborhoods in an open-ended format that encourages self-guided exploration. View the Poetry Foundation building, designed by John Ronan & Associates, and listen to the sound installation We, which gathers many voices reciting the famous Gwendolyn Brooks poem “We Real Cool.” We, a textural sound piece that layers and loops over sixty separate readings to create an immersive experience, also showcases the sonic excellence of the Poetry Foundation performance space acoustics.

The Open Door Readings 
The School of the Art Institute’s Quraysh Ali Lansana with Lake Forest College’s Robert Archambeau
Tuesday, October 17, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
The Library & Gallery are open to the public until 7:00 PM.
The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students. 

Poetry & Film
Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy a documentary by Haydn Reiss
Thursday, October 19, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
Poet Robert Bly stands out even among the celebrated, revolutionary generation of American artists who burst forth in the 1950s. Award-winning director Haydn Reiss’s new film, Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy, charts Bly’s singular path from farmer’s son on a wintry Minnesota farm to radical anti–Vietnam War activist to author of Iron John and controversial leader of the 1990s men’s movement. Filmed over four years in five states and two countries, the film features Louise Erdrich, Donald Hall, Garrison Keillor, Philip Levine, Martin Sheen, Tracy K. Smith, and other luminaries.

Poetry & Music
Music Inspired by Korean Poetry: Sijo Poems in Settings from Classical to Hip-Hop
Saturday, October 21, 4:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
A reception follows the program.  
The sijo is a traditional Korean poetic form typically exploring cosmological, metaphysical, or pastoral themes. Though less familiar than its Japanese cousin, the haiku, Korean sijo has a similarly rich heritage. In ancient Korea, sijo were written to be not only read, but sung. The sijo was the most popular form of lyric poetry in Korea for over 500 years and is now considered a classic example of traditional Korean fine arts. This performance explores music inspired by sijo through jazz piano, piano/violin and cello/flute duos, and a hip-hop performance by Elephant Rebellion.
Cosponsored with the Sejong Cultural Society

Poetry & Dance
Big Dance Theater: Cage Shuffle
Sunday, October 22, 7:30 PM
Links Hall
3111 North Western Avenue
Tickets: $20 general/$15 industry 
Available through linkshall.org
Paul Lazar speaks a series of one-minute stories by John Cage from his 1963 score Indeterminacy while simultaneously performing choreography by Annie-B Parson. The stories are spoken in a random order with no predetermined relationship to the dancing. Chance serves up its inevitable blend of strange and uncanny connections between text and movement. With live tape and digital collage scored and performed by composer Lea Bertucci.

Poetry off the Shelf 
Vievee Francis
Tuesday, October 24, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
Vievee Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (2006), Horse in the Dark (2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for a second collection, and Forest Primeval (2015), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Poetry off the Shelf 
Erika L. Sánchez: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
Sunday, October 29, 2:00 PM
Claudia Cassidy Theater
Chicago Cultural Center
77 East Randolph Street
Chicago Humanities Festival Members: $12; General: $15; Student/Teacher: $10  
Tickets to the 2017 Chicago Humanities Festival go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 19, and to the general public on Tuesday, September 26. The full schedule of all programs is available at chicagohumanities.org 
Poet, feminist, and cheerleader for young women everywhere, Erika L. Sánchez discusses self-determined identity, cultural expectations, and grief through her young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (2017). Set in Chicago, the story centers on Julia as she attempts to understand her sister’s life after her death. The author of Lessons on Expulsion (2017), Sánchez was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship in 2015.
Presented in partnership with Chicago Humanities Festival 

Poetry off the Shelf
Paisley Rekdal
Monday, October 30, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
Paisley Rekdal is the author of the poetry collections A Crash of Rhinos (2000), Six Girls without Pants (2002), The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (2007), and Imaginary Vessels (2016), as well as the book of essays The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000). Rekdal’s honors include a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. She teaches at the University of Utah.
Cosponsored with the Writing Program, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

NOVEMBER 

Poetry off the Shelf
Danez Smith: Don’t Call Us Dead
Friday, November 3, 8:30 PM
Gallery Guichard
436 East 47th Street
Chicago Humanities Festival Members: $12; General: $15; Student/Teacher: $10  
Tickets to the 2017 Chicago Humanities Festival go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 19, and to the general public on Tuesday, September 26. The full schedule of all programs is available at chicagohumanities.org 
Danez Smith, author of [insert] boy (2014), is a founding member of the Dark Noise Collective and the recipient of several fellowships including a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Smith’s new collection, Don’t Call Us Dead (2017) imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police. Following the reading, Danez Smith will have a conversation with poet and sociologist Eve L. Ewing.
Presented in partnership with Chicago Humanities Festival and Gallery Guichard

Poetry off the Shelf 
Christian Wiman on Faith, Doubt & Joy
Saturday, November 4, 1:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
Chicago Humanities Festival Members: $12; General: $15; Student/Teacher: $10 
Tickets to the 2017 Chicago Humanities Festival go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 19, and to the general public on Tuesday, September 26. The full schedule of all programs is available at chicagohumanities.org
Poet and scholar Christian Wiman served as the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013. In his 2013 memoir My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Wiman writes that “human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us.” That idea serves as a manifesto of sorts for Wiman’s prose and poetry. His new book, Joy: 100 Poems, explores this topic through a survey of modern poetry, from Emily Dickinson to Mahmoud Darwish.
Presented in partnership with Chicago Humanities Festival

Poetry off the Shelf 
Ruth Irupé Sanabria & Felicia Zamora
Thursday, November 9, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
A reception follows the program.
Ruth Irupé Sanabria has published two collections of poetry. The manuscript for her second book, Beasts Behave in Foreign Land (2017), received the 2014 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press Award. Felicia Zamora, 2017 – 2018 Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, CO, is associate poetry editor for Colorado Review. Her books include Of Form & Gather (2016), winner of an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize from University of Notre Dame, & in Open, Marvel (forthcoming, Parlor Press), and Instrument of Gaps, (forthcoming, Slope Editions). She won the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse. 
Cosponsored with Red Hen Press and Letras Latinas at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies

Poetry Day
No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks
Friday, November 17, 6:30 PM
Saturday, November 18, 6:30 PM
Sunday, November 19, 2:00 PM
Pritzker Auditorium
Harold Washington Library Center
400 South State Street
Enter on South Plymouth Court
This program is first come, first served.
Inaugurated by Robert Frost in 1955, Poetry Day is one of the oldest and most distinguished poetry reading series in the country. This year’s presentation is the world premiere of No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks from the Chicago-based theater company Manual Cinema. In this unique staged retelling of Brooks’s life, Manual Cinema uses simple, illuminative paper-cut puppetry to visually represent the life and work of one of Chicago’s most beloved literary figures. Story by Chicago poets Eve L. Ewing and Nate Marshall and music by Jamila Woods and Ayanna Woods.
Cosponsored with Chicago Public Library

The Open Door Readings  
Chicago State University’s Kelly Norman Ellis & DePaul University’s Kathleen Rooney
Tuesday, November 21, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
The Library & Gallery are open to the public until 7:00 PM.
The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students. 

Poetry off the Shelf 
Bearden’s Odyssey featuring Kwame Dawes, Matthew Shenoda & Natasha Trethewey
Monday, November 27, 7:00 PM
Inspired by Romare Bearden’s 1977 sequence of twenty watercolors, Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (2017) gathers original poems from thirty-five of the most revered African diaspora poets in the United States. The book’s award-winning editors, Kwame Dawes and Matthew Shenoda, join the nineteenth US Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, for a reading and conversation about Bearden and his work.
Cosponsored with Cave Canem Foundation and Triquarterly Books

Celebration
Who Reads Poetry Book Party
Wednesday, November 29, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
Join us for the official Chicago release party for Poetry magazine's new prose anthology, Who Reads Poetry, published by the University of Chicago Press. Celebrate with the editors, special guests, and a toast to who reads poetry. Festivities include readings, music, and libations. Books available for purchase at a special rate.

DECEMBER

Poetry & Music
Eighth Blackbird: Olagón Preview
Monday, December 4, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
Eighth Blackbird composer/fiddler Dan Trueman and Irish sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionaírd bring the 1,400-year­-old Irish legend Táin Bó Cúailnge roaring into modernity with Olagón. Set to a new epic text by Pulitzer Prize–­winning poet Paul Muldoon, this seventy-minute song cycle exposes a martini­-guzzling, pill-­popping Queen Medhbh set against her lovelorn King Ailill, and other lovers. This program features excerpts from the full-length show premiering later in December.

Poetry off the Shelf 
Paul Muldoon
Thursday, December 7, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
Paul Muldoon is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. His most recent collection, Selected Poems 1968 – 2014, was released in 2016 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Muldoon’s honors include a T.S. Eliot Prize, an Irish Times Poetry Prize, a Griffin International Poetry Prize, an AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and a Shakespeare Prize. The former poetry editor at the New Yorker, Muldoon teaches at Princeton University.

Celebration 
POETRY Winter PARTY 
Wednesday, December 13, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
Join us for Poetry magazine’s seasonal party! Celebrate recent issues of Poetry with contributors, editors, and the poetry curious. Festivities include readings, performances, music, and libations. Subscription specials and individual issues available. 

The Open Door Readings  
Ball State University Katy Didden with Mark Neely
Tuesday, December 19, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation 
The Library & Gallery are open to the public until 7:00 PM. 
The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students. 

Poetry Foundation Gallery

Exhibition
Through the Words of Miss Brooks
June 16 – September 22, 2017
In celebration of the hundredth birthday of Gwendolyn E. Brooks (1917 – 2000), Illinois Poet Laureate and the first Black winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tyrue “Slang” Jones painted the mural, Through the Words of Miss Brooks (2017), on the Poetry Foundation gallery wall. Slang is a Chicago native and has been called one of the most versatile contemporary artists of the last four decades. He is known worldwide as a graffiti, street, and commercial artist as well as a muralist.

Exhibition
Signs of Resistance
October 5–December 22, 2017
Chicago poets, artists, and organizing communities are invited to contribute signs of resistance for an exhibition in response to social unrest. The Poetry Foundation, along with partnering institutions, call for posters, signs, banners, and other ephemera of direct action that speak to our moment in an effort to document the landscape of words in action and amplify resistance to racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and other systems of environmental and institutional violence. Signs of Resistance celebrates the voices of those on the frontlines and the poetics of citizenship.
See the Call for Materials: Signs of Resistance post on the Harriet blog for more information on how to submit material to the exhibition.

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About the Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit poetryfoundation.org.

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POETRY FOUNDATION | 61 West Superior Street | Chicago, IL 60654 | 312.787.7070

Media contact:
Polly Faust, [email protected], 312.799.8065
Elizabeth Burke-Dain, [email protected], 312.799.8016