Broad Stage Presents Red Hen Press Poetry Hour 4/4

The Broad Stage presents the Red Hen Press Poetry Hour, a new recurring digital program, the first for both organizations, via The Broad Stage's Facebook Live. The Saturday, April 4 program at 8:00 p.m. features award-winning poet Major Jackson and guests Francesca Bell, Katharine Coles, Didi Jackson, and Douglas Kearney reading selections of their original works hosted by author Sandra Tsing Loh.

Major Jackson, the author of five books of poetry, has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Loh is the author of six books, including The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (2014, W.W. Norton), which was selected as one of The New York Times' 100 Most Notable Books.

Red Hen Press Poetry Hour is part of The Broad Stage at Home, a destination offering new, livestreamed content from artistic partners and archival concert footage. Episodes later available on The Broad Stage Facebook and YouTube pages and redhen.org

Providing context for the Poetry Hour, Dr. Kate Gale, Co-Founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, said, "Poetry allows us to breathe, and we need a moment to breathe more than ever right now. We're trapped in an endless news cycle in our houses working while our children tear down the walls. Poetry allows us to pause and reflect on the immensity of life. Poetry will carry us through this and give us moments when we're focused on something other than this news, this thing we're all in together."

Rob Bailis, Artistic and Executive Director of The Broad Stage, said, "Poetry is where I live, what I read before I go to bed at night. Poetry is simultaneously fiction and nonfiction-and can inhabit that space where there are as many gray areas as there are people alive."

"While we are all isolated, how can we stay in communication and not lose contextual conversations? Because in the absence of those, we are lost. This feels like a time when artistic exploration-finding a truth and being authentic to this moment as much as we can-would be incredibly useful for all. I think people are looking for content that isn't slickly produced entertainment. I am excited and honored to be launching our first digital series."

The Broad Stage at Home also offers The Broad Stage Music Mornings; the next episode Broadcast Live on Sunday, April 5 at 11:00am features cellist Lynn Harrell and student performances from SOL-LA Music Academy.

Blank Verse Films provide some pre-recorded readings. For more information, please visit https://www.filmindependent.org/programs/fiscal-sponsorship/blank-verse-films/

Participants (in alphabetical order)

Francesca Bell was born in Spokane, Washington into a family with deep, hardscrabble roots in the Northwest. Her maternal great-grandfather, the son of a prostitute and her client, was raised in a brothel. He raised his own six children, including Bell's grandmother, on a 160-acre homestead in Plummer, Idaho. On her father's side, the Norwegian Wikum family, when traced 700 years back, was already renowned for its spectacularly heavy drinking. The hard living continued in America where the clan was referred to around Coeur d' Alene, Idaho as "the fighting Wikums." Bell was raised in Washington and Idaho and settled as an adult in California. She did not complete middle school, high school, or college and holds no degrees. Bell's poems appear in many magazines including ELLE, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Tar River Poetry. Her translations, from Arabic and German, appear in Arc, B O D Y, Circumference | Poetry in Translation, Mid-American Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She is the co-translator of Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish's collection, A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito (Dar Fadaat, 2017), and the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019).

Poet, novelist, and editor Katharine Coles earned a BA at the University of Washington, an MA at the University of Houston, and a PhD at the University of Utah. Coles is the author of several collections of poetry, including Wayward (2019), Fault (2008), Utah Book Award winner The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension (2001), and The One Right Touch (1992). She is also the author of the novels Fire Season (2005) and The Measurable World (1995). Her collaboration with visual artist Maureen O'Hara has led to the artists' book Swoon (2003) as well as several installations. As the inaugural director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, Coles edited the anthology Blueprints: Bringing Poetry into Communities (2011) and the reports Poetry & New Media: A Users' Guide and Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry. Coles has received numerous honors for her work, including a term as Utah's poet laureate, both a fellowship and a New Forms Project grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a PEN New Writer's Award, an Antarctic Artists and Writers Grant from the National Science Foundation, and grants from the Utah Arts Council and the Salt Lake City Arts Council. At the University of Utah, Coles has directed the Creative Writing Program; co-directed the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, with mathematician and biologist Fred Alder; and served as series editor for the University of Utah Press's Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Book Award. She lives in Salt Lake City.

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. After having lived most of her life in Florida, she currently lives in South Burlington, Vermont teaching creative writing at the University of Vermont.

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and included in multiple volumes of Best American Poetry. Major Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). BOMB says: "[Buck Studies] remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical." His collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher's Weekly called "an extraordinary book." His third poetry collection, Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014) examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood and was a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry. Cultural critic Greg Tate remarked that Kearney's second book, National Poetry Series selection, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), "flows from a consideration of urban speech, negro spontaneity and book learning." Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito Press 2016) collects several of his libretti, including one written in a counterfeit Afro-diasporic language of which M. NourbeSe Philip writes: "[it] meets the anguish that is English in a seismic, polyphonic mash-up that disturbs the tongue." He was the guest editor for 2015's Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan). He has received a Whiting Writer's Award, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Indiana Review; and anthologies, including Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, Best American Poetry, Best American Experimental Writing, Of Poetry and Protest, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, The Breakbeat Poets, and What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Poets in America. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family a little west of Minneapolis, MN. He teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Sandra Tsing Loh is the author of six books, including The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (2014, W.W. Norton), which was selected as one of The New York Times' 100 Most Notable Books. It is based on her piece on menopause in The Best American Essays 2012, originally published in The Atlantic. The Madwoman in the Volvo inspired Sandra's hit play of the same name, as well as her stand-up show, The B***h Is Back: An All-Too Intimate Conversation, which ran at The Broad Stage in 2015. Her new book The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem will be published by W.W. Norton in June 2020.

Previous Episode (available on The Broad Stage Facebook Page and redhen.org) First broadcast Saturday, March 28: Live and pre-recorded poetry readings from California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia, Douglas Manuel, Brendan Constantine, Jason Schneiderman, and Felicia Zamora, and a discussion about the necessity of poetry and the arts during these times with Gioia, Artistic and Executive Director of The Broad Stage Rob Bailis, and Red Hen Press Managing Editor and Co-founder Kate Gale, moderated by Sandra Tsing Loh.

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