Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 7-8:30 PM
Bryant Park Reading Room (6th Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY)
The Bryant Park Reading Room’s Word for Word Poetry series is pleased to present “An Evening of CUNY Poets,” hosted by Anne Lovering Rounds, an assistant professor of English at Hostos Community College. The reading will take place on Tuesday, May 20, from 7 to 8:30 PM in the Bryant Park Reading Room. The Reading Room is closest to the entrance of Bryant Park at 42nd Street and 6th Avenue. This event is free and open to the public.
Featured poets will be Professors Carl James Grindley and Isaac Goldemberg of Hostos Community College (from the English and Humanities departments, respectively); Professor Alex Long of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (English); and Professor Salita S. Bryant of Lehman College (English). Professor Goldemberg will share his work in Spanish and Hostos student Annelly Chalas will read it in translation.
Teaching and writing in the City University of New York is the common thread among the faculty readers of May 20. In the unique outdoor space of the Bryant Park Reading Room, the reading will be an opportunity for connection and artistic cross-pollination between different academic departments; among different languages, poetic approaches, and styles; and among the different CUNY campuses.
About the Poets
Salita S. Bryant holds a Ph.D. in literature, an M.Ed. in Clinical Counseling, and an MFA in poetry. She is Assistant Professor of English at Lehman College and author of Addie Bundren is Dead. This year she was awarded the Gradiva Award for Poetry from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and has previously won the Midwest Writing Center’s Off Channel contest, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Connecticut Poetry Award, Boulevard’s Emerging Poets Award, the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize, and Iron Horse’s Discovered Voices Award. She has been nominated for three Pushcarts. She has published in Alimentum, The South Carolina Review, Agenda, Nimrod, Snake Nation Review, Third Coast, Dogwood, and The North American Review, among others. She lives in New York City and is a psychoanalytic candidate with Harlem Family Institute.
Isaac Goldemberg was born in Peru in 1945 and has lived in New York since 1964. He’s the author of four novels, ten books of poetry, and three plays. His most recent publications are Diálogos conmigo y mis otros (2013), La vida breve (2012), and Acuérdate del escorpión (2010). In 2001 his novel The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner was selected by the Yiddish Book Center of the United States as one of the 100 most important Jewish books of the last 150 years. Presently, he’s Distinguished Professor at Hostos Community College, where he’s director of the Latin American Writers Institute and editor of Hostos Review/Revista Hostosiana.
Isaac is pleased to be sharing the podium with Annelly Chalas, a Hostos sophomore who will read his poems in English translation. Annelly is a Criminal Justice major as well as an athlete on the Hostos women’s volleyball team and an accomplished student of poetry.
Raised in Victoria, Canada, Carl James Grindley is an associate professor of English at Hostos Community College. He holds a doctorate in the history of the English language from the University of Glasgow, and a master’s degree in English literature and a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, both from the University of Victoria. In 2008, three of his novels were published under the title Icon (No Record Press). His poetry and fiction have appeared in Anemone Sidecar, Mikrokosmos, and Petrichor Machine. His new collection of poetry, Lora and the Dark Lady (Ravenna Press), was the 2011 winner of the Ravenna Press Cathlamet Prize for Poetry.
Alexander Long‘s third book of poems, Still Life, won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2011. A chapbook, also titled Still Life, won the 2010 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. His first two books, Vigil and Light Here, Light There, were published in 2006 and 2009 respectively. Long has also published two other chapbooks: Six Prose Poems (Brandenberg Press, 2004), and Lunch with Larry (Q Ave Press, 2014). In 2004, he co-edited, with Christopher Buckley, A Condition of the Spirit: the Life & Work of Larry Levis. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Callaloo, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Hotel Amerika, Pleiades, Smartish Pace, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Offending Adam, Third Coast, and The Southern Review. An associate professor of English at the City University of New York, John Jay College, Long is also working on a biography of the American poet Larry Levis. In his other life, he plays bass, and records and writes with a number of Philadelphia-based bands.
About the Bryant Park Reading Room
The history of the Bryant Park Reading Room dates to 1935. During the Depression, the New York Public Library opened an “Open Air Library,” free and open to everyone, for the enjoyment of reading materials. The original reading room had a few benches, book and magazine cases, and a table with a beach umbrella, and was run by five librarians. Closed in 1944 and re-opened under the auspices of the Bryant Park Corporation, today’s Reading Room is modeled after the original. The Reading Room is home to extensive programming for adults and children each season. From May through September, the Word for Word Poetry Series brings weekly poetry readings to the space; readings frequently focus on poets from a specific press, or poetry with a shared theme or topic.
About the Genesis of “An Evening of CUNY Poets”
An assistant professor of English at Hostos since 2012, Anne Lovering Rounds is an emerging poet whose work has appeared in New Writing and the Hartskill Review. She became part of the Bryant Park poetry community after being a blogger for Reading Room poetry events. As a blogger she became friends with Bryant Park’s tireless Director of Tourism and Visitor Services, Paul Romero, who runs the Reading Room and has been kind enough to allow the curation of the May 20th reading.
Professor Rounds’s idea for this reading stemmed from a desire to hear some of the many voices of CUNY’s creative writers perform together. The reading is a chance to experience the connections that arise organically from such collaborative artistic events. Uniting faculty members from multiple campuses under one canopy, the reading is also intended as a way to explore broadly what it means to be both teacher and poet.
