TONIGHT: Poetry Salon with Jessica Jacobs and Yerra Sugarman
A reminder about tonight's event with two wonderful poets at 8 EST/ 7 CST
I am delighted and honored to host poets Jessica Jacobs and Yerra Sugarman tonight at a very special poetry salon starting at 8 EST/ 7 CST on Zoom. I am very excited about this pairing of daring poets, who each engage deeply with figures from the past. You can glimpse a bit of that in their book titles and bios, featured below. Please scroll down for Zoom info.
Each salon lasts one hour. Each poet will read 3-4 poems for us, and then talk about how those poems were made. I know that the making of these poems will fascinate you. Then we will open it up to your questions and comments.
Poet Yerra Sugarman. Photo credit: Pamela Lischin.
You can read about Yerra’s beautiful latest collection, Aunt Bird, here: The Poetry of Vicarious Witness - by Aviya Kushner (substack.com) Yerra and her work are profiled here: About Yerra Sugarman | Academy of American Poets. And you can read about Jessica’s lovely latest collection, Unalone, in the most recent edition of the newsletter here: Poems About Abraham - by Aviya Kushner (substack.com)
It’s a chance to have a conversation with two wonderful poets.
POET BIOS:
Yerra Sugarman is an American poet, essayist, translator, and teacher. Born in Canada, she lives in New York City.
She is the author of three poetry collections: Forms of Gone, which was a National Book Critics Circle “Favorite First Book” and was awarded PEN American Center’s PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award; The Bag of Broken Glass, which was a National Book Critics Circle “Recommended Book”; and, most recently, Aunt Bird, a hybrid collection comprised of lyric poems, prose poems, and lyric essays published by Four Way Books. Aunt Bird was the winner of the American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Books Awards in the category of General Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards in Poetry, as well as for the New England Poetry Club’s Motton Book Prize.
She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, PEN American Center’s PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award and its Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, a Canada Council Grant for Creative Writers, a Chicago Literary Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and an American Book Fest prize.
She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and grew up in a community of survivors in Toronto.
Poet Jessica Jacobs. Photo credit: Parker J. Pfister
Jessica Jacobs is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis (Four Way Books, March 2024); Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), named one of Library Journal‘s Best Poetry Books of the year, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University and the Goldie Award from the Golden Crown Literary Society, and a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell, American Fiction, Eric Hoffer, and Julie Suk Book Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry, was an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association and a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Julie Suk Awards. Her chapbook In Whatever Light Left to Us was published by Sibling Rivalry Press. She co-authored Write It!, a collection of writing prompts from Spruce Books, an imprint of Penguin/RandomHouse. She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.