Poetry Foundation Announces Fall Events Season

CHICAGO – The Poetry Foundation’s fall event season embraces poetry in an array of offerings that range from a salon concert, featuring music by Aaron Copland and Charles Ives, to readings by Joyce Carol Oates and Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon. Juan Felipe Herrera, the new US Poet Laureate, reads at the Harold Washington Library for the 61st annual Poetry Day— a series Robert Frost inaugurated in 1955. Jacqueline Woodson, the Young People's Poet Laureate, will appear in collaboration with the Chicago Humanities Festival, as will Rae Armantrout and Claudia Rankine. The season begins on Wednesday, September 2 with acclaimed playwright and performer Beau O’Reilly’s Plug Nickel Cabaret, featuring Troy Martin and Judith Harding.

 Join us for ongoing programs such as the monthly Open Door Readings, which mix emerging and established poets from Chicago’s great writing programs, and the weekly Wednesday Children’s Poemtime. Be sure to also visit the Poetry Foundation Gallery for art exhibitions featuring intersections of weaving and language, with artists Dianna Frid and Cecilia Vicuña, September 4 – November 27, and of poetry and scent, featuring design historian Debra Riley Parr, December 11 – February 19.

 The following events are free admission and open to the public on a first come, first served basis except when otherwise noted. These events take place at the Poetry Foundation, 61 West Superior Street, Chicago, unless otherwise specified.  More information about our events is available at poetryfoundation.org/events. Images are available upon request.

 Poetry Foundation Fall 2015 Events

 Poetry on Stage
Plug Nickel Cabaret
Wednesday and Thursday, September 2 & 3, 7 pm

Enjoy an evening of spoken word, kinetic storytelling, and darned good tunes featuring acclaimed playwright and performer Beau O'Reilly, accompanied by the wildly talented Troy Martin, along with the "exquisitely ... surprising" Judith Harding reprising her most irreverently agile character, La Dink.

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Harriet Reading Series
CAConrad: Exorcism: Reparative Rituals with the Poetic Blade
Tuesday, September 8, 7 pm

The Harriet Reading Series features talks, performances, and readings by poets who have appeared on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog. The series presents both established and emerging poets whose writing finds innovative approaches to the craft of poetry. CAConrad is the author of seven books. The latest is ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (2014). He is a 2015 Headlands Art Fellow, and has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Banff, Ucross, RADAR, and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

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Poetry & Music
Salon Concert: The Transcendentalists
Thursday, September 10, 7 pm
The program begins and concludes with a reception.

The first salon concert of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago’s 2015 Collaborative Works Festival explores the impact of Transcendentalism on American composers. This concert features Grammy-nominated soprano Nicole Heaston, Lyric Opera of Chicago star soprano Laquita Mitchell, 2015 Avery Fisher Career grant winner, pianist Michael Brown, and CAIC cofounders Nicholas Phan and Shannon McGinnis performing songs by Charles Ives, as well as settings of Emily Dickinson’s poetry by iconic American composers Aaron Copland and Lee Hoiby.

Cosponsored with the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago

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The Open Door Readings
Northwestern University’s Mary Kinzie & Alexandra Pechman with Lake Forest College’s Robert Archambeau & Nicole Nodi
Tuesday, September 15, 7 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 college and graduate writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students.

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Poetry & Art
Cecilia Vicuña: “The Origin of Weaving” Performance
Thursday, September 17, 6 pm

Chilean poet and multidisciplinary artist Cecilia Vicuña presents a site-specific  performance as part of Dianna Frid and Cecilia Vicuña: A Textile Exhibition. Vicuña’s ritual performances and site-specific installations weave together art and poetry, text and textile, the ancestral and the avant-garde. Her work creates new languages in which wordplay, science, and linguistics meet to confront the realities of ecological disaster.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Villeda, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Lisa Fishman, & Daniel Borzutzky
Thursday, September 24, 7 pm
A reception follows the program.

Each year, roughly three dozen emerging and established writers from around the world travel to Iowa City, Iowa, a UNESCO City of Literature, for a ten-week residency at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. IWP Director Christopher Merrill introduces this reading, featuring 2015 residents Villeda and Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, with Chicago poets Lisa Fishman and Daniel Borzutzky.

Cosponsored with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa

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Poetry & Art
Dianna Frid in Conversation with Jen Bervin
Friday, September 25, 12 pm

The artist Dianna Frid discusses her work and relationship to text, form, and the book in this gallery talk and conversation moderated by artist Jen Bervin as part of Dianna Frid and Cecilia Vicuña: A Textile Exhibition.

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Poetry & Music
Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe
Tuesday, September 29, 7 pm

Celebrated musicologist Don Michael Randel, a president emeritus of the University of Chicago, leads an exploration of interpretation and expression in Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Based on text from the Lyrisches Intermezzo of poet Heinrich Heine, Dichterliebe is a subtle, sophisticated marriage of some of the most exquisite music and poetry ever written. Tenor Jonathan Johnson, a member of The Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center at Lyric Opera of Chicago, and pianist Craig Terry, Ryan Opera Center music director, perform the masterpiece in its entirety.

Cosponsored with Lyric Unlimited

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Poetry off the Shelf
William Archila and David Campos
Thursday, October 1, 7 pm
A reception follows the program.

William Archila is the author of The Art of Exile, which won an International Latino Book Award in 2010. His second book, The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, recently won the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize and was featured in Poets & Writers Page One. David Campos is the author of Furious Dusk, winner of the 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. He currently lives in Fresno, California, and teaches at Fresno City College and College of the Sequoias.

Cosponsored with Red Hen Press and Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies

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Poetry off the Shelf
United States Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera
Tuesday, October 6, 6 pm booksigning; 6:30 pm performance/reading
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
112 North 6th Street
Springfield, Illinois

The son of migrant farm workers, Juan Felipe Herrera was educated at UCLA and Stanford University and earned his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His numerous poetry collections include 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971–2007, Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (2008), and Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (1999). He was named US Poet Laureate in 2015.

Cosponsored with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum

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Poetry Day
Juan Felipe Herrera Reading and Conversation
Wednesday, October 7, 6 pm
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium
Harold Washington Library Center
400 South State Street
Doors open at 5 pm

Join the US Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the 61st annual Poetry Day. In 2012, Juan Felipe Herrera was named California Poet Laureate, and the US Poet Laureate in 2015. He has won a Hungry Mind Award of Distinction, a Focal Award, two Latino Hall of Fame Poetry Awards, and a PEN West Poetry Award. His honors include a UC Berkeley Regent’s Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Stanford Chicano Fellows.

Cosponsored with the Library of Congress and the Chicago Public Library

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Poetry on Stage
“Grandma’s Tale”
Friday, October 9, 12 pm

The Vilnius-based theater laboratory OPEN CIRCLE has created its first performance for children after the well-known poem “Grandma’s Tale” by noted Lithuanian poet Salomėja Nėris. A gift for the youngest theater viewers, as well as for their parents and caretakers, this musical improvisation and performance becomes a gateway to the mysterious and entertaining fairy-tale world.

Cosponsored with the Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania of Chicago, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Lithuanian Foundation, and Bravo Bites

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Poetry off the Shelf
Curbside Splendor Publishing
With Erika T. Wurth, W. Todd Kaneko, and Dasha Kelly
Tuesday, October 13, 7 pm

Curbside Splendor authors Erika T. Wurth (Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend), W. Todd Kaneko (The Dead Wrestler Elegies), and Dasha Kelly (Almost Crimson) read from their works at this program introduced by Jacob S. Knabb, Curbside Splendor Publishing senior editor.

Cosponsored with Curbside Splendor Publishing

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Poetry off the Shelf
Paul Muldoon
Wednesday, October 14, 7 pm

Paul Muldoon’s latest collection is One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015). He is the author of numerous other books of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the 1994 TS Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize. He is the current poetry editor at the New Yorker.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Joyce Carol Oates
Friday, October 16, 7 pm

The author of many books, Joyce Carol Oates has penned best-selling novels, critically acclaimed collections of short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, the unlikely bestseller On Boxing (1987), and a new memoir about her childhood, The Lost Landscape (2015). 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.

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Open House Chicago
Saturday and Sunday, October 17 & 18, 10 am– 5 pm

The Poetry Foundation celebrates Open House Chicago, an annual festival weekend that provides an opportunity for people 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.

Cosponsored with the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

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The Open Door Readings
University of Illinois’s Adam Clay & Bobby Bolt with DePaul University’s Kathleen Rooney & Jessica Anne
Tuesday, October 20, 7 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 college and graduate writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Szymborska Celebration with Clare Cavanagh
Wednesday, October 21, 7 pm

Well-known in her native Poland, Wisława Szymborska received international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Collections of her poems that have been translated into English include People on a Bridge (1990), View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995), Monologue of a Dog (2005), and the recently released Map: Collected and Last Poems. She died in 2012. Translator Clare Cavanagh and a host of luminaries celebrate Szymborska’s life and work.

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Harriet Reading Series
Elaine Kahn Performance
Thursday, October 22, 7 pm

The Harriet Reading Series features talks, performances, and readings by poets who have appeared on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog. The series presents both established and emerging poets whose writing finds innovative approaches to the craft of poetry. Oakland-based poet, musician, and artist Elaine Kahn is the author of Women in Public (2015). She is the managing editor of Flowers & Cream, an independent publisher of limited edition poetry books, and a founding member of the P.Splash Puppet Collective.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Rae Armantrout
Saturday, October 31, 10:30 am

Rae Armantrout is a founding member of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, a group of poets that emerged from the late-1960s San Francisco scene. Since then, she has continued to woo readers, fellow poets, and critics, winning a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Versed (2009). Now she visits Chicago to celebrate her latest volume, Itself (2015).

Presented in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival
Tickets go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 8 and to the general public on Monday, September 14 at chicagohumanities.org/citizens.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Claudia Rankine: “An American Lyric”
Saturday, October 31, 2 pm
Northwestern University School of Law, Thorne Auditorium
375 East Chicago Avenue

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) is an indictment of contemporary times. Using a poetic frame, the poet uncovers an insidious racism embedded in the everyday – from the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to the lecture halls of the ivory tower. An offhand comment or a helpful call from a neighbor can carry ominous weight, as Rankine’s observations move from bewilderment to disappointment to quiet ire. Citizen is a true revelation—it leaves its readers unsettled, moved, and changed with every page. 

Presented in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Illinois Humanities, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Tickets go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 8 and to the general public on Monday, September 14 at chicagohumanities.org/citizens.

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Poetry on Stage
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: Poetry in Performance
Saturday, October 31, 7:30 pm
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Edlis Neeson Theater
220 East Chicago Avenue

Tickets to the 2015 Chicago Humanities Festival go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 8 and to the general public on Monday, September 14. The full schedule of all programs is available at chicagohumanities.org/citizens.

As the country continues to reel from unending stories of police brutality and violence, hip-hop historian Jeff Chang (Can’t Stop Won’t Stop), jazz musician David Boykin, sound artist Christine Hume, scholar Lauren Berlant, and poet Roger Reeves, among others, join Claudia Rankine for a powerful performance that reflects on race in the United States today.

Presented in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Tickets go on sale to CHF members on Tuesday, September 8 and to the general public on Monday, September 14 at chicagohumanities.org/citizens.

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Young People’s Poet Laureate Reading
Jacqueline Woodson: Brown Girl Dreaming
Sunday, November 1, 2 pm
First United Methodist Church
77 West Washington Street

Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir in verse, is a rich, poignant description of life as a black child in the 1960s. Woodson has written more than 30 books, and her latest work has resonated with readers and critics alike, winning both a National Book Award for Young People and the Newbery Honor.  In 2015, Woodson was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. Woodson takes to the stage for a conversation about her life and influences.

Presented in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival and generously underwritten by the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom and the Freedom to Read Foundation, and the Lohengrin Foundation
Tickets are available free to CHF members on Tuesday, September 8 and free to the general public on Monday, September 14 at chicagohumanities.org/citizens.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Ciaran Carson
Monday, November 2, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation

Ciaran Carson was born and raised in Belfast, where he lives with his wife, fiddle player Deirdre Shannon. Educated at Queen’s University, Belfast, he was appointed poetry chair at its Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in 2003. He is not only a poet, but also a traditional musician, scholar of the Irish oral tradition, prosewriter, and translator. Wake Forest University Press has published 15 of his volumes, including First Language (1994), which won the first-ever TS Eliot Prize, Breaking News (2003), which won the prestigious Forward Prize, and From Elsewhere (2015).

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Celebration
POETRY Fall PARTY
Wednesday, November 4, 6:30 pm

Join us for Poetry magazine's seasonal party! Celebrate the September, October, and November 2015 issues of Poetry with contributors, editors, and the poetry curious. Festivities include readings, performances, music, and libations. Subscription specials and individual issues available.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Patricia Smith
Tuesday, November 10, 7 pm

Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of six books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won a Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection. Smith is a professor at the College of Staten Island and an instructor in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.

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Poetry off the Shelf
An Adventure Was Home: Gertrude Stein in Chicago
Wednesday, November 11, 7 pm
The program opens and concludes with a reception.

An evening of readings and discussion inspired by Gertrude Stein’s November 1934 visit to Chicago, when she read at both the Renaissance Society and the Arts Club of Chicago. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of the 14^th Istanbul Biennial, plays Stein, reading portions from the three lectures delivered in 1934, and Liesl Olson, historian at Chicago’s Newberry Library, offers context for Stein’s visit and moderates a short conversation among the small group of participating poets and readers, including Lyn Hejinian and Patrick Durgin.

Cosponsored with the Renaissance Society and the Arts Club of Chicago

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The Open Door Readings
University of Illinois at Chicago’s Roger Reeves & Cristina Correa with Illinois State University’s Francesco Levato & Benjamin Busch
Tuesday, November 17, 7 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 college and graduate writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students.

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Bagley Wright Lecture Series
Srikanth Reddy
Thursday, December 3, 7 pm

The Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry provides leading poets with the opportunity to explore their thinking on the subject of poetry and poetics in depth. Srikanth Reddy is the author of the poetry collections, Facts for Visitors (2004) and Voyager (2011), and the book of criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry (2012). He has received fellowships and awards from the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Creative Capital Foundation, among others.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, Reddy is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago. 

Cosponsored with the Bagley Wright Lecture Series

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Poetry off the Shelf
Tony Hoagland
Thursday, December 10, 7 pm

Tony Hoagland’s new collection of poems is Application for Release from the Dream (2015). His earlier books of poetry include Donkey Gospel (1998), winner of a James Laughlin Award; What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010). Hoagland has received an O.B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, a Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, and a Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. He teaches at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.

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Poetry & Art
“Volatile!” Opening
Friday, December 11, 6:30 PM
A reception follows the program.

On the evening of the opening for Volatile!, the Poetry Foundation hosts a panel with curator and design historian Debra Riley Parr to discuss intersections of scent and poetry with scent designers, artists, and poets.

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The Open Door Readings
School of the Art Institute’s Elise Paschen and Katy Jo Smith with New Trier High School & Northwestern University’s John O’Connor and Alison O’Connor
Tuesday, December 15, 7 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 college and graduate writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students.

Poetry Foundation Fall 2015 Exhibitions

Dianna Frid and Cecilia Vicuña: A Textile Exhibition
September 4–November 27, 2015

In this exhibition, the artists investigate intersections of weaving and language, exploring works that play with the book, the loom, and other forms of fiber arts and text. Cecilia Vicuña installs a new iteration of The Origin of Weaving, a poem in space that traces the symbolic invention of the first cross thread from which all weaving is derived. Dianna Frid’s recent works are part of an ongoing exploration in which the materials of text—letters, words, and syntactical constructions—are foregrounded in their material incidence.

Volatile! A Poetry and Scent Exhibition
December 11, 2015 – February 19, 2016 

What if every poem had its own fragrance, beyond the literal smell of the materiality of the page?  What if one could smell the poet’s imaginative, conceptual, intellectual world, the text unfurling into an aroma? In Volatile!, design historian Debra Riley Parr presents a number of objects and experiences that invite speculative connections between poetry and scent.

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.

About Poetry Magazine
Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Monroe’s “Open Door” policy, set forth in Volume 1 of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented—often for the first time—works by virtually every major contemporary poet.

About the Poetry Foundation Library
The Midwest’s only library dedicated exclusively to poetry, the Poetry Foundation Library invites the reading of poetry through its collections and public programs. Browse a collection of more than 30,000 volumes. Experience audio and video recordings in private listening booths. View exhibitions relating to the world of poetry. The library continues to offer its weekly Wednesday Poemtime, a storytime event for children ages two through five that introduces poetry through fun, interactive readings and crafts; and field trips that welcome group visits from students of all ages and lifelong learners. To learn more or to arrange a field trip, contact [email protected]. 

Follow the Poetry Foundation and Poetry on Facebook at facebook.com/poetryfoundation or on Twitter @PoetryFound.

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