The Broad Stage and Red Hen Press in Pasadena are partnering to bring you poets Rita Dove and Tracy K. Smith in “Poetry at the Crossroads,” a virtual conversation on Thursday, May 20, starting at 6 p.m.
Regarded as among the most important poets of our time, Dove and Smith, come together for this unique engagement to discuss the future of American poetry and read selections from their inspiring and significant bodies of work.
In announcing the event, The Broad Stage said the conversation will be moderated by interdisciplinary creative, activist and educator Amber Flame and will take the viewer through poetry to see “what has been done and what can be.”
“Rita and Tracy share their thoughts on the crossroads of poetry that we now find ourselves in, as a new generation of poets build on and elevate the form whose foundation is made of, in part, these two poets themselves,” the announcement said.
Rita Dove and Tracy K. Smith are both former U.S. poet laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for her third book of poetry, “Thomas and Beulah,” in 1987 and was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton and the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama — the only poet ever to receive both. Her many honors include a 2017 NAACP Image Award and the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award. She is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Her eleventh collection of poetry, “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, “Life on Mars.” The collection draws upon the genre of science fiction in considering who we humans are and what the vast universe holds for us. In poems of political urgency, tenderness, elegy and wit, Smith conjures version upon version of the future, imagines the afterlife, and contemplates life here on Earth. “Life on Mars” was a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.
Amber Flame is a 2016 and 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee and Jack Straw Writer Program alum. Her first full-length poetry collection, “Ordinary Cruelty,” was published in 2017 through Write Bloody Press. Flame was a recipient of the CityArtist grant from Seattle’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs to write, produce and perform her one-person play, “Hands Above the Covers.” Recently named Program Director for Hedgebrook, she continues to work as a writing instructor while working on a third collection of poetry, remounting her full-length play, developing a few nonfiction anthologies and raising her daughter.
Tickets to the virtual event start at $10. To get tickets, visit www.thebroadstage.org/
After purchasing your ticket, you will receive a confirmation email with a link taking you to the virtual lobby.
For more information, call (626) 356-4760.
