John Ashbery Poetry Series Presents

A Reading by Dawn Lundy Martin and Hoa Nguyen

Dawn Lundy Martin is the author of A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (2007), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; DISCIPLINE (2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize and as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and several chapbooks. Her 2015 collection Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Her latest collection, Good Stock, Strange Blood, was published by Coffee House Press in 2017.

“In her latest collection, Martin contemplates the corporeal aspects of black identity, including scars from historical traumas and pain from fresher wounds. . . . In this esoteric and ruminative work, God is shown to be present in the midst of a host of desires and griefs both great and small.” —Publishers Weekly

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C., area, Hoa Nguyen lives in Toronto, where she teaches poetics in several university settings and in a popular, long-running private workshop. Her recent books include As Long as Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998–2008, and Violet Energy Ingots, nominated for a 2017 Griffin Prize for poetry.

“Nguyen’s playful criticism of our society of the spectacle shows how we deflate the currency of ancient nobility by our own reductive values surrounding identity and beauty, as she cries the old songs down the river.” —The New York Times

This reading is part of a series that will honor the memory of John Ashbery. Introduced by Ann Lauterbach, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

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For more information, call 845-752-4454, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: László Z. Bitó '60 Conservatory Building

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