Reading with Michael Dumanis and Margaret Ray at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow NY.
Join Program Director, Jennifer Franklin, as she welcomes Oliver de la Paz, Micgael Dumanis, and Margaret Ray to read and engage in a conversation about craft and their new collections.
NB: This reading will take place in person at the Hudson Valley Writers Center. Please reserve your spot when you know that you will be able to attend. Space is limited.
Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, will be published Liveright Press in summer 2023. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A founding member, Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the Artist’s Trust of Washington, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
Michael Dumanis is the author of the poetry collections Creature (Four Way Books, 2023) and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. He is also coeditor (with poet Cate Marvin) of the younger poets’ anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006) and (with poet Kevin Prufer) of Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2013). His poems have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, The Believer, Colorado Review, The Common, Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, and Poetry; in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Project and on the Poetry Society of America website. His writing has been recognized with residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy; a grant from the Ohio Arts Council; a 2012 Community Partnership for Arts and Culture Creative Workforce Fellowship; and the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award. Born in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union, Dumanis emigrated with his family at the age of five and grew up in Western New York. He holds a BA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Dumanis joined the Bennington faculty in Fall 2012. In addition to being a member of the Literature faculty, he serves as Director of Poetry at Bennington and Editor of Bennington Review.
Margaret Ray grew up in Gainesville, Florida and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. A winner of the Third Coast Poetry Prize and a Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America for her chapbook Superstitions of the Mid-Atlantic, her poems have appeared in Narrative, The Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in New Jersey. Selected by Stephanie Burt as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Margaret Ray’s Good Grief, the Ground interrogates the everyday violences nonchalantly inflicted unto women through personal, political, and national lenses. Moving between adolescence and adulthood, Ray alternates between dark humor and heart-wrenching honesty to explore grief, anxiety, queer longing, girlhood, escape from a bad marriage, and the dangers of lending language to a thing. With stunning wit and precision and attention, we see Ray show us what it is to be human: the mess of tenderness and darkness and animosity.
