An Afternoon with poets Allison Adair and Tiana Clark

On Sunday, March 21, from 3 - 4 p.m., ET, the Concord Poetry at the Library Series will feature two stunning award-winning poets, Allison Adair and Tiana Clark, who will read and talk about their writing lives and the creative process. Please register here for the Zoom link.

Adair's book, The Clearing, looks backward to the Civil War and the historical hard life of rural Pennsylvanian women. Selected by Henri Cole for Milkweed’s Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing was named a New York Times "New and Noteworthy" book. "Out of dry farming soil come these wise, mineral-like poems about young motherhood, mining disasters, miscarriages, memory, and much more," notes Cole.

Adair’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Waxwing, and ZYZZYVA, and have been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in the Mid-American Review Fineline Competition. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Adair lives in Boston, where she teaches at Boston College and Grub Street.

Clark's book, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, winner of the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, uses "phrasing so ravishing you can only take so much of it at a time" to examine Tennessee's past and present and the poet's own biracial heritage. "Critiquing the commodification of black pain while also acknowledging and revealing your hurt as a black person is tricky as hell. It is dangerous. And that is precisely what Tiana Clark does in these beautiful, vulnerable, honest poems. It is a kind of tenderness, and a kind of belief. A reaching toward. It is a kind of care," praises poet Ross Gay.

Clark is also the author of Equilibrium (Bull City Press), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, a Pushcart Prize, the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. A graduate of Vanderbilt University’s M.F.A. program, her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Washington Post, VQR, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Clark teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

This Series is sponsored by The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, Concord, MA.