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Poetry Center at Smith
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Spring 2016
“Everything I do is leaning toward / what we came for.”
—​ C.D. Wright
M a r i l y n C h i n is a self-described activist poet. Her most recent
book, Hard Love Province, is a testament to this unwavering dedication—
and also a winner of the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Award for poetry, which
honors books that confront racism and examine diversity. Chin’s work
is fearless and pointed, humorous and heart-wrenching, all the while
maintaining a deep and close engagement with the world. Born in Hong
Kong as Mei Ling Chin, she was raised in Portland, Oregon as Marilyn,
her transliterated name. In the biting poem “How I Got That Name,”
she attributes this re-christening to her father’s obsession with Marilyn
Monroe. Chin’s work is enriched and empowered by this racial and
cultural double-consciousness.
Tuesday, February 23
7:30 pm, Helen Hills Hills Chapel
MARILYN CHIN
Author of four books of poetry, Chin has also published a novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen,
translated the Chinese poet Ai Qing, and co-translated the Japanese poet Gōzō Yoshimasu. A
graduate of U. Mass Amherst, and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Chin’s awards and fellowships
include a Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, the Paterson Prize, and a Fulbright
Scholarship to Taiwan. Having taught classes and workshops worldwide, she currently co-directs
the MFA program at San Diego State University.
Supported by the Department of English Language & Literature
Tuesday, March 22
7:30 pm,
Paradise Room, Conference Center
JOY LADIN &
OLIVER BENDORF
J o y L a d i n 's seven books of poems, as well as her memoir, Through
the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, reflect a passionate desire
to make meaning—filtered through and driven by her personal journey of
transition. Writing through thoughts of suicide, illness, loneliness, and
despair to arrive at her definition of “joy,” she gives us a portrait of a “soul
in and out of flesh, a marriage out of love, and a body from amputation
to wholeness.” Ladin quite literally wrote her way to a sense of self, and
continues to write poems in which that self is a “door or a window or a
launching pad…toward that greater, more expansive place.”
Ladin holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University.
As the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution, she approaches the
intersection of gender identity and Judaism with a scholar’s erudition and a poet’s sensibility. Her
poems are at once ferocious and tender, scholarly yet approachable, filled with great humor and
heartbreaking sadness. Ladin has taught at Princeton, Tel Aviv University (as Fulbright Poet-inResidence), Reed College, and U. Mass Amherst. Ladin’s work has appeared widely in journals, and
she received a 2016 NEA fellowship.
O l i v e r B e n d o r f is a cartoonist, librarian, and educator. His
first book, The Spectral Wilderness, selected by Mark Doty for the Wick
Poetry Prize, was reviewed widely and greeted with high acclaim. Doty
wrote: “It’s a joy to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored
in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex
project of transforming their own gender… Oliver Bendorf writes from a
paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just
appeared in the world.” Stacey Waite described the book, named a Best
Poetry Book of 2014 by Entropy Magazine, as “a queer ecology endlessly
transformed by possibility, grief, and the unruly wanting of our names
and bodies.” And Natalie Diaz proclaimed that “Bendorf’s poems give us all we have ever wanted,
to wake up and feel that the body we are in is ours, that the hands on the ends of our wrists—our
body’s gates of tenderness—are large enough to hold in them all the things we have desired.”
Born in Iowa, Bendorf earned a BA in English from the University of Iowa, and was the Martha
Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin, where he
taught workshops on creative writing, cartooning, and zine-making. A recipient of a Lambda
Fellowship, he lives in Washington, DC.
Supported by the Women & Gender Studies
A native of Lafourche Parish in Louisiana, K i r b y J a mb o n ’s parents instilled in him a pride in
his Cajun heritage and Louisiana French language. His passion for his culture is evident in his work
as a teacher, activist, actor, storyteller, and writer. Jambon’s poems have appeared in journals in
three countries. He’s the author of two books, L’École Gombo, awarded the 2006 Prix Mondes Francophones, and Petites Communions: Poèmes, chansons et jonglements, awarded the 2014 Prix Henri de Régnier
from the Académie Française. The Academy’s citation described Jambon as an “exquisite poet in the
tradition of Villon and Marot,” who, “for his lyricism and humor, deserves to be more well-known.”
Tuesday, March 29
7:30 pm, Poetry Center
KIRBY JAMBON
Presented by French Studies
Tuesday, April 19
7:30 pm, Weinstein Auditorium,
Wright Hall
C. D. WRIGHT
We mourn the loss of
C.D. Wright
(1949-2016)
Please see our website
for her full bio and sample poems
Visiting poet for 4/19
to be announced soon
According to The New York Times, C . D . W r i g h t “belongs to a school
of exactly one.” Her nineteen books, written in a hauntingly discernable
voice, leap bravely from one immersion of focus to another, often
incorporating journalism, photography, and collaboration with other artists,
to dig deeply into thorny subjects, from mass incarceration to the Iraq war.
Elliptical by nature, yet filled with intensity and directness, Wright’s work
comprises a monumental attempt to make sense of our inner and outer
worlds. She sees into the darkest of hearts and spaces, as in One Big Self,
which investigates the lives of Louisiana prisoners, and received the LangeTaylor Prize from Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. When she won
the 2009 International Griffin Trust Poetry Prize, the judges proclaimed that she “wakes the reader—
from dreams of both a perfect world and one drowned in horror—to the saving beauty of clear sight.”
Born in Mountain Home, Arkansas, C.D. Wright is the recipient of the nation’s highest honors,
including the Lenore Marshall Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, and a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Poet Laureate of Rhode Island
from 1994 to 1999, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2013. For
over thirty years, Wright edited Lost Roads Publishers with her husband, the poet Forrest Gander.
She is currently the Kapstein Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.
From the Director
W h at E l s e W e ’ r e U p T o
In addition to our core reading series, the Poetry
Center hosts and/or supports a rich variety of
literary events. We thought to shine a light on some
events we’re excited to be part of this spring!
Feb 8 & 9
ILLUSTRIOUS ALUMNA VISIT
Rebecca Foust ’75, prize-winning poet and author of
two chapbooks and four full-length collections will
lead a workshop with the senior Poetry Capstone
class, and read her poems and discuss craft with
students. Paradise Drive, her most recent publication
and winner of the 2015 Press 53 Award, is a booklength sonnet sequence that delivers an ironic look at
privilege and despair in Marin County, tempered by
playful humor and word-music.
March 24
14th ANNUAL FIVE-COLLEGE POETRYFEST
J uan F elipe H errera ' s "El Árbol"
20th in our series of fine letterpress
broadsides by BARRY MOSER
For more information, contact Jen
Blackburn at 413-585-4891 or
jblackbu@smith.edu or visit us at
http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/wp/
gallery/broadsides/
Student poets—two from each college—each
read for five minutes to celebrate undergraduate
poetry-writing. Madison Chafin & Precious Musa
will represent Smith this year.
7:30 pm, Hampshire College
script,” now to be performed by live actors.
Directed by Mariel Bell ’16.
7:30 pm, Poetry Center
April 9
POETS FOR LIFE: POETS RESPOND TO AIDS
A benefit reading in support of A Positive Place
(formerly AIDS Care/Hampshire County), featuring
Eduardo Corral, Patrick Donnelly, Michael Klein, and
Joan Larkin, with musician Laura Wetzler. This event
is organized by Donnelly, the current Poet Laureate of
Northampton, with support from the Northampton
Council for the Arts and the Poetry Center.
3:00 pm, Paradise Room, Conference Center
April 14
MOVING THROUGH GRIEF:
Poems, Songs and After
A presentation by two exceedingly wise and
talented alumnae—
Jane Yolen ’60, internationally-acclaimed, bestselling poet & writer
Molly Scott ’59, singer, songwriter/poet, activist,
psychologist
7:00 pm, Neilson Browsing Room
March 24 & 25
UNDER PARADISE VALLEY:
a multimedia work by Pamela Petro
Petro is the current Lucille Geier Lakes Writer in
Residence. “UPV” began as a word-and-image
art installation based on local 18th century
gravestones, from which Petro derived a “graphic
When you support our programming, you not
only help to underwrite our reading series—19
years old and going strong!—but you also make it
possible for us to help to bring you events initiated
by our friends and colleagues. Thank you!
Ellen Doré Watson
All events free and open to the public
For more information: 413-585-4891
Bookselling & signing follow the readings
www.smith.edu/poetrycenter
To receive e-mail reminders of events, send your e-mail address to: poetrycenter@smith.edu
W E VA L U E YO U R S U P P O R T & R E V E L I N YO U R P R E S E N C E