5:30-6:30p Lower Level Gallery

40 Years of Poetry: Celebrating the Legacy of the Marin Poetry Center

Join us for the opening reception of a new exhibit that captures the spirit, creativity, passion, and history behind 40 years of the Marin Poetry Center. The exhibit will include photographs, ephemera, posters and recordings. The exhibit will be on display through the end of April to celebrate National Poetry Month.

5:30-8:00pm Creekside Room

Come celebrate with us, see friends, browse & buy poetry books, and immerse yourself in poems as we honor the legacy of the Marin Poetry Center, and toast to an early kickoff for National Poetry Month!

5:30-6:30PM Local Poets Book Fair! Come mingle with poets, see new and longtime friends, and support local poetry!

6:30-8:00PM Join us for Poetry Readings, a Panel Discussion with early board members, and Awards featuring MPC's Founding/Early Board Members: Jane Hirshfield, Judith Ayn Bernhard, Doreen Stock and John Hart!

PLUS: Announcement of the new Marin County Poet Laureate! 

FEATURED POETS:

JANE HIRSHFIELD is the author of nine books of poetry, including Ledger; The Beauty; Come, Thief; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She is also the author of two now-classic collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, and has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of world poets from the past. Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry and have been finalists for The National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize and long-listed for the National Book Award. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets, and she presents her work at literary and interdisciplinary events worldwide. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, and Poetry, and have been selected for ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A resident of Northern California, she is a 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

JUDITH AYN BERNHARD is a writer, poet, translator and teacher. She is a founding member and past chair of the Marin Poetry Center and a current member of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade. Her book, Prisoners of Culture (introduction by Jack Hirschman), was published by CC. Marimbo in 2014. Her most recent book is Marraiges, a selection of short prose pieces. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Byron Spooner, where she teaches writing and occasionally give public readings of her work.

“Judy Bernhard is a voice packed with both insight and irony in the face of social and political injustice, and a deeply compassionate sense of humor that belongs with the people of the world suffering under its current reign of corporate fascism.” –Jack Hirschman

DOREEN STOCK is a poet, memoir artist, literary translator, and prose writer. She has worked prodigiously over the past half-century in several genres—verse, the prose poem, hybrid poetic forms, fiction, memoir, the critical or scholarly essay, translation from Russian, from Spanish—Doreen Stock is one of the secret originals of American poetry.  Creating independently outside academic institutions or identity-centered movements while embracing Jewish tradition as a grounding ethos, publishing widely but obscurely in little magazines and small-press books, she has produced a steadily growing and branching body of work that is authentically and distinctively her own, and timelessly beyond current trends.

JOHN HART

American non-fiction writer, poet, and editor. Since 1970, love of land and love of language have met in the work of poet and environmental journalist John Hart. Author of sixteen books and several hundred other published works.  Winner of the James D. Phelan Award for Poetry, the Commonwealth Club Medal in California (twice), and the David R. Brower Award for Service in the Field of Conservation. Hart serves as an editorial consultant on public involvement documents in the planning and environmental fields.  He also translates from French and from German: most recently the book Landscapes of the Chinese Soul: The Enduring Presence of the Cultural Revolution (London: Karnac, 2014), a collection of essays edited by Thomas Plaenkers. John Hart has a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Princeton and is an editor/instructor in the craft.