James Arthur, Timothy Donnelly & More Set for Pen Parentis' 1/14 Literary Salon

Pen Parentis welcomes the New Year with an intimate and lively evening of poetry and conversation, featuring five acclaimed poets: James Arthur, Timothy Donnelly, Miranda Field, Lynn Melnick, and KC Trommer. Each author will read from their work and then talk about their writing and parenting lives in an informal roundtable. With this many poets on the stage, you can expect an animated, sharp, and witty discussion covering a wide variety of topics! It's sure to be fun and thought-provoking, and we hope that you will join us.

The reading takes place on Tuesday, January 14th at the elegant Hotel Andaz at 75 Wall Street, which graciously provides happy hour specials on beer on wine. The night kicks off at 7:00 pm, and admission is free. RSVP is recommended, but not required-the Pen Parentis Literary Salon is open to adults over the age of 21. The authors' books are available for purchase from The Park Slope Community Bookstore.

January 14th's Literary Salon features:

James Arthur's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, and a residency at the Amy Clampitt House. His first book, Charms Against Lightning, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012 as a Lannan Literary Selection. He teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore with his wife and son.

Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010; Picador, 2011), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. With John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O'Brien he is the co-author of Three Poets published by Minus A Press late last year. His poems have appeared such magazines asA Public Space, Fence, Harper's, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, among others. He is a recipient of The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize and fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the poetry editor of Boston Review and teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

Miranda Field is the author of Swallow (Houghton-Mifflin). Her work appears in various journals and several anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande), and Not For Mothers Only (Fence Books). She has received a Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Award, a Discovery/The Nation Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Teaching Fellowship at Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Born and raised in North London, UK, she lives in Manhattan with her husband, poet Tom Thompson, and their two sons-the younger of whom calls her "my robot that makes crepes."

Lynn Melnick is the author of If I Should Say I Have Hope (YesYes Books, 2012). Her poetry has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Guernica, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The New Republic, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in Opium and Forklift, Ohio, and she has written essays and book reviews forBoston Review, Coldfront, LA Review of Books, Poetry Daily, and VIDAweb, among others. She grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

A graduate of the MFA program at The University of Michigan, KC Trommer has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and has been awarded fellowships from the Table 4 Writers Foundation, the Center for Book Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the Prague Summer Program. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Coconut, MARGIE, Octopus, The Sycamore Review, Poetry East and a number of other journals. She is currently seeking a publisher for her first collection of poems and is at work on her second collection. A chapbook of her poems, The Hasp Tongue, is forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2014. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens with her family.

More info at penparentis.org.