An Afternoon of Poetry with Andrea Cohen and Fady Joudah

Join poet Andrea Cohen and Palestinian American poet-physician Fady Joudah for a reading and discussion of their new poetry collections on Sunday, April 18 at 3:00 p.m. Please register here for the Zoom link.

Andrea Cohen will read from her playful seventh collection Everything (Four Way Books, 2021), featured in Lambda Literary’s February’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books List. These are poems that traffic in wonder and woe, in dialogue and interior speculation. Humor and gravity go hand in hand. David Orr writing for The New York Times observes “this is acutely literary writing that wears its literariness lightly enough for long journeys to unfamiliar places.” Publishers Weekly says “it is the wit that astounds here, and an intelligence that sees the world anew.”

Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere. Among her honors are a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at The MacDowell Colony.

Cohen’s other poetry collections include Nightshade (Four Way, 2019), winner of the 2020 American Fiction Book Award for Contemporary Poetry; Unfathoming (Four Way, 2017); Furs Not Mine (Four Way, 2015), the winner of the 2016 Golden Crown Award for Poetry; Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011); Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009); and The Cartographer's Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999).

Cohen directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge.

Fady Joudah will read from his fifth collection Tethered to Stars (Milkweed Editions, 2021), poetry that “reaches for the heavens…while remaining grounded in the everyday” – as noted in his recent PBS News Hour interview on how his love for poetry helps him communicate with patients better. Naomi Shihab Nye writing for The New York Times Magazine says "This is what we have had to do, amid pandemic, grief, political chaos, fires, human rights disasters: continue on with our lives. Doing chores . . . taking walks . . . teaching kids . . . trying to stay steady. In his brilliant book, Joudah writes about the mysterious cosmos swirling with intricate linkages―as his phone is pinging.”

Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, chosen by Louise Glück, the 2020 Nobel Prize winner. His other collections include Alight (Copper Canyon Press, 2013); Textu (Copper Canyon, 2014), a collection of poems written on a cell phone wherein each piece is exactly 160 characters long; and Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (Milkweed, 2018).

Joudah is also a prominent translator of poetry from the Arabic. He translated several collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work in The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon, 2006), which won the Banipal prize from the UK and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; in If I Were Another (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) which won a PEN USA award in 2010; and in The Silence that Remains (Copper Canyon, 2019). Joudah’s translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (Yale University Press, 2012) won the prestigious Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser's Petra: The Concealed Rose (Tavern Books, 2014) and A Map of Signs and Scents (Northwestern University Press, 2016).

Joudah is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He lives with his family in Houston, where he practices internal medicine.

Read more here about the Poetry at the Library Spring Series sponsored by Friends of the Concord Free Public Library. For more information, please visit www.concordlibrary.org.