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Poets for Science In-Person

Join us for a celebration of Poets for Science with a reading by Pulitzer-prize winner Forrest Gander joined by Jane Hirshfield, Kimiko Hahn and Meryl Natchez. Poets for Science started on Earth Day, April 22, 2017, when demonstrators around the world participated in a March for Science in a call to support and safeguard the scientific community, fact-based decision making, basic research, and freedom of speech for scientists. Jane Hirshfield joined poets and scientists in a March for Science on the National Mall in Washington D.C. This program is in collabration with the Marin Poetry Center.

Registration highly recommended. Adults and high school students only! Free wine reception at 6:30pm for pre-registered guests. Waitlist line opens up at 6:45 on a first come, first served basis. 

During the month of May, the Library will also be displaying a special collection of 14 human-sized poems banners, curated by Jane Hirshfield.  Each poem in the Poets for Science collection was specifically chosen by Hirshfield to demonstrate the connection between poetry and science, and how each discipline can inform the work of the other. 

 

Forrest Gander, known best as a writer and translator, has a degree in geology and a lifelong fascination with poetry and science. Gander’s book Be With was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Concerned with the way we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, his book, Core Samples from the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gander's books have been translated and published in more than a dozen other languages, and he has been awarded the Best Translated Book Award. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. In 2011, he was awarded the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship.

 

Jane Hirshfield, writes “some of the most important poetry in the world today,” according to Naomi Shihab Nye in The New York Times. She is one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. She is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder of Poets For Science in conjunction with the 2017 March for Science in Washington D.C. Hirshfield is the author of several books of essays and translations and nine award-winning collections of poetry, most recently Ledger (Knopf, 2020). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Center Book Award, California Book Award, and others. In 2019 she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 

 

Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poems, including: Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020); Brain Fever (WWN, 2014), and Toxic Flora (WWN, 2010), both collections prompted by science. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the N.Y. Foundation for the Arts. She has taught in graduate programs at the University of Houston and New York University, and is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York; she has also taught for literary organizations such as the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and Kundiman.

 

Meryl Natchez’ fourth book, Catwalk, received an Indie Best Book 2020 Award from Kirkus Reviews. She was a finalist for the James Heart Poetry Contest and the Joan Swift Memorial Poetry Award. and Natchez’ work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, LA Review of Books, Hudson Review, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, ZYZZYVA, and others.

Date:
Friday, May 19, 2023
Time:
7:00pm - 8:30pm
Time Zone:
Pacific Time - US & Canada (change)
Location:
Main Reading Room
Audience:
  Adults     High School  
Categories:
  After Hours     Poetry     Poets for Science  
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