Poetry from the Concord Free Public Library

Join vibrant, award-winning poets Krysten Hill and Cynthia Manick for a reading and discussion of their work and writing lives with poet-editor Joyce Peseroff on Sunday, May 16 at 3:00 p.m. ET.

Please register here for the Zoom link.

Krysten Hill (Photo credit: Jonathan Beckley) reads from her body of work whose poems “exude at once vulnerability, rawness, and lucid beauty,” notes Boston former Poet Laureate, Danielle Legros Georges. Hill’s debut collection How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016) is a lively, urgent song. Answering the writers whose voices raised her, Hill calls on Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, and Zora Neale Hurston to help her navigate the complicated landscape of selfhood. Hill’s speaker, wise and direct, open yet elusive, also sings for the women who brought her up: her aunt, her grandmother, and her mother. These spirits who’ve guided her life and taught her through example how black women persevere have given her the means to bear witness to an age of racial violence. The collection was honored with the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club; Award judge Sara Baker observed “Hill’s words are precise and potent, and each time you read them, her poems mean more.”

Hill is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award and a 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, apt, B O D Y, Boiler Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Muzzle, PANK, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Winter Tangerine Review and elsewhere. A skilled performer, Hill has showcased her poetry on stage at such venues as The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Blacksmith House, Cantab Lounge, and Merrimack College. She received her MFA in poetry from University of Massachusetts Boston, where she currently teaches.

Poet and storyteller Cynthia Manick (Photo credit: Sue Rissberger) reads from her body of work, including her debut collection, Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), a book of confident, powerful meditations about family, womanhood, and racial histories. Poet Nikky Finney, National Book Award winner, writes that " these are not the things you will hear about Black people on the nightly news. But they remain the things that lock the arms of Black people around Black people when we need to keep moving on. I am so grateful for this sweet box of sacred words."

A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School, Manick has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell Colony, and Château de la Napoule among others. Winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, Manick was also awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. She is Founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue; and her poem "Things I Carry Into the World" was made into a film by Motionpoems, an organization dedicated to video poetry, and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month. A performer at literary festivals, libraries, universities, and most recently the Brooklyn Museum, Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Callaloo, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.

Manick is the editor of Soul Sister Revue: A poetry Compilation (Jamii Publishing, 2019) and The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Publishing, forthcoming, 2021). She currently serves on the board of the International Women’s Writing Guild and the editorial board of Alice James Books. She resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Joyce Peseroff is the author of six poetry collections, her most recent, Petition (Carnegie Mellon University Press, Fall, 2020.) She edited Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake, The Ploughshares Poetry Reader, and Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon. Her fifth book of poems, Know Thyself, was designated a “must read” by the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award. Recent poems and reviews appear in American Journal of Poetry, Consequence, On the Seawall, Massachusetts Review, Plume, Salamander, and on the website The Woven Tale Press. Her honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation as well as a Pushcart Prize. She directed and taught in UMass Boston’s MFA Program in its first four years. Currently she blogs for her website and writes a poetry column for Arrowsmith Press.

This event is sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library.