Martin Espada - Distinguished Poetry Reading Series

The Distinguished Poets Series will feature a virtual reading with Martín Espada on Saturday, December 4, 2021 at 2:30 PM – 3 PM ET.

Maria Gillan and Martin Espada 

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. 

His newest book of poems from Norton is Floaters which was awarded this year's National Book Award for Poetry.

His other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), and Alabanza (2003). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). 

He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. 

His website is martinespada.net

You can join the reading live and later archived at https://youtu.be/oIu-bbyQkXo

View previous programs on the Poetry Center at PCCC YouTube channel.

  

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets which pairs her poems with her paintings. Maria's artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Poem: The Strange House of the Past

The Strange House of the Past

       

Moving through the strange house

      of the past

            the black ink of midnight

what I want is dangerous

      the sound the wind makes,

          a portrait of the world

                in soft orange or blood red.

I dream my cousin teaches me

      how to balance in a kayak

            though I am terrified of water.

In the finished basement where

      I first made love, I learn how to tell

            a rose from a frog, how to break my heart.

Why does the world reek of death and violence?

      In the changing light of the past who

            we were rises up to confront us

We cannot smile or laugh,

      our faces crumple.

            What we want is too dangerous

            to hold or touch.

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

from Ancestor's Song (Bordighera Press, 2013)

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets which pairs her poems with her paintings. Maria's artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Paterson Literary Review Virtual Reading

Join the Poetry Center in celebrating 40 years of publishing the Paterson Literary Review (PLR). The virtual readings have been split into two sessions featuring many contributors to issue #49.

The second reading for PLR #49 will be Saturday, November 20, 1 PM ET on Zoom.

PLR features unpublished work by well-known writers, as well as by writers whose work is so good it should be better known. Poems from PLR have appeared in Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthologies. PLR has been chosen by the Library Journal, as one of the ten best literary journals in the country, and PLR was chosen in 2008 as a best journal by the Montserrat Review.

PLR #49 – Publication Celebration, Part 2, November 20, 2021, 1:00 PM

Livestream & archived video link

Poem: At the Factory Where My Mother Worked

At the Factory Where My Mother Worked

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Once when I was seventeen, I visited the factory

where my mother worked. It was on the second floor

up a flight of narrow, rickety stairs, and when I opened

the door, the noise of sewing machines slapped my face.

I searched for my mother in the close-packed row

of women bent over their sewing. The floor manager

picked up one of the pieces my mother had finished,

screamed, “You call this sewing?” and threw the coat

on the floor. The tables were lit by bare light bulbs,

dangling down on cords. I had never seen the place

where my mother worked. She thought we should be

protected from all that was ugly and mean

in the grown-up world. “Children should be children,”

she’d say. “They’ll learn trouble soon enough.

We don’t need to tell them about it.” She did not answer

the floor walker. Instead, she bent her head over her sewing,

but not before I saw the shame on her face.

This poem appeared in THE WIDE SHORE #3

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets which pairs her poems with her paintings. Maria's artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Paterson Literary Review #49 Virtual Reading November 6

Join the Poetry Center in celebrating 40 years of publishing the Paterson Literary Review (PLR) with two readings featuring many contributors to issue #49. 

PLR features unpublished work by well-known writers, as well as by writers whose work is so good it should be better known. Poems from PLR have appeared in Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthologies. PLR has been chosen by the Library Journal, as one of the ten best literary journals in the country, and, in 2008, PLR was chosen as a best journal by the Montserrat Review.

Readings by contributors to the Paterson Literary Review #49 will be held over two Saturdays, Nov 6 and Nov 20, 1 PM ET on Zoom. The video link for November 6 is https://youtu.be/lFMeMRF0jxM and the program will also be archived at the same link on the Poetry Center YouTube channel.