Poetry at the Bryant Park Reading Room
August 8, 2023, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Award-winning poetry by established and emerging poets throughout the summer.
Arda Collins is the author of Star Lake (The Song Cave, 2022), recently nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award, and It Is Daylight (2009), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is also a recipient of the Sarton Award in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Apart from her work as a writer and teacher, she has also been an associate producer on the PBS documentary series Frontline and American Experience. She teaches at Smith College.
Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a
finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is published by Liveright Press (2023). With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born, award-winning poet, educator, librettist, publisher and social advocate. He is the author of four collections of poetry, including American Scapegoat (Black Lawrence Press, May 2023), which interrogates the socio-political framework of a democracy at war with itself and its humanity, and When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (2020), winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Awards for Poetry. He is co-editor of Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience (Cherry Castle Publishing, 2022), and the recipient of a number of honors including a Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation and grants from the New England Poetry Club and Chateau d’Orquevaux in France. He is also Founding Editor and Publisher at Central Square Press and Founder/Executive Director at the Faraday Publishing Company, Inc., a nonprofit literary services and social advocacy organization.
Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He is Director of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to tiny, delightful things.
Hosted by Nathan McClain, a poet, editor, and educator living in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) and Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), and his poems and prose have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Poem-a-Day, The Common, The Critical Flame, and upstreet, among others. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literary Arts at Hampshire College, and serves as Poetry Editor of The Massachusetts Review.