Poetry of the West with Red Hen Press
Saturday, March 29 12:10-1:25 p.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
Will Alexander, Peggy Shumaker, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Harryette Mullen: We feasted, we cried, we wept for our ancestors, and for the ancestors who lived on these lands and for our children, and we wrote the poetry of remembrance and laughter and forgetting and of writing new stories. The narrative of the West is being rewritten by these poets. We write ourselves into a new story.
Panelist Bios:
Peggy Shumaker has been a Rasmuson Foundation Distinguished Artist, an Alaska State Writer Laureate, and an NEA fellow. She is the author of nine books of poetry and a lyrical memoir, Just Breathe Normally. Professor emerita from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker taught in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA at PLU. She serves on the advisory board for the Prairie Schooner Book Prizes and the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. Shumaker is editor of the Boreal Books series (a Red Hen Press imprint) and the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press, and contributing editor for Alaska Quarterly Review.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of six books of poetry and five books of nonfiction, and editor of the anthology The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, and Connection. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA fellowships, Stanford’s Stegner Fellowship, and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing has been widely published, including in The Norton Book of Nature Writing and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada.
Photo credit: Bear Guerra
Harryette Mullen’s poetry collection Recyclopedia (Graywolf Press, 2006) won a PEN Beyond Margins Award in 2007. Her previous book, Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press, 2002), was a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2005 she was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2004.
Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist. His influences range from poetic practitioners (Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, etc.) to the paradigm of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga and the Egyptian worldview as understood by Cheikh Anta Diop and R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. His books include Asia & Haiti, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Compression & Purity, Sunrise in Armageddon, Diary as Sin, Inside the Earthquake Palace, Towards the Primeval Lightning Field, and Mirach Speaks to His Grammatical Transparents. He lives in the City of Angels.