Brooklyn Poet Laureate, Tina Chang is the author of the poetry collections Half-Lit Houses and Of Gods & Strangers and co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond. Her poems have appeared in American Poet, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and The New York Times among others.
Anthologized in Identity Lessons, Poetry Nation, Asian American Literature, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems and in Poetry 30: Poets in Their Thirties, she has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Van Lier Foundation among others. The mother of two, she currently teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.
.
Born in 1950, poet Marie Howe received her MFA from Columbia University in 1983. Her debut volume, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood as winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. Since then, she has published two more collections, What the Living Do (1998) and The Kingdom of the Ordinary (2008). She also co-edited the anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.
Her awards include a fellowship at the Bunting Institute, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has served on the faculty of several schools, including Tufts University and Dartmouth College. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia University in New York City, where she lives with her daughter.
Joanna Smith Rakoff is the author of the novel A Fortunate Age, which won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers, was a New York Times Editors' Pick, a winner of the Elle Readers' Prize, a selection of Barnes and Noble's First Look Book Club, an IndieNext pick, and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. As a journalist and critic, she's written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post Book World, the Boston Globe, Vogue, Time Out New York, O:The Oprah Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. She has degrees from Columbia University, University College, London, and Oberlin College. This is her second appearance at Pen Parentis.
Evan Smith Rakoff's poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere; a native of North Carolina, he has been a fellow at the Millay Colony, Ragdale, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. Evan and Joanna live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with their two children.
Martin MacKinnon was raised in the Island of Skye off the northwest coast of Scotland where he spent most of his schoolyears pestering girls with silly notes and rhymes. He now resides in Queens with his wife Kim and her 6 year old son Kal who refers to Martin as Bonus-dad.
Please us this donate button to keep the Pen Parentis Literary Salon alive. This one-of-a-kind reading series is run primarily on random donations from readers like you. No amount is too large or too small. One click (and a valid credit card) is all it takes.
Your donations help keep this Literary Salon going strong.
