Jennifer Elise Foerster

Jennifer Elise Foerster and Chad Sweeney

30 MAY 2019 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Jennifer Elise Foerster, Bright Raft in the Afterweather, and Chad Sweeney, Little Million Doors, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, wheelchair accessible, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)


MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Jennifer Elise Foerster's new book of poems is Bright Raft in the Afterweather. Joy Harjo says of it, "We are adrift in mythic waters that hold the possibility of rebirth even as they float the remains of human destruction." A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Jennifer Foerster has published one previous collection, Leaving Tulsa. She received a 2017 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship and is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Chad Sweeney's new book of poems, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, is Little Million Doors. Kazim Ali, the prize's judge, says, "Still and spare, Little Million Doors is a book-length series of lyrics that mourns a dead father…Perhaps ghostly but never disembodied, these lyrics feel immediate, necessary and absolutely brand new." He has published five previous collections, and two books of translation, the selected poems of the dissident Iranian poet H.E. Sayeh (from the Farsi with Mojdeh Marashi) and Pablo Neruda's final book, Calling on the Destruction of Nixon and the Advancement of the Chilean Revolution. His poetry is widely published in literary journals and has been included in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Verse Daily. He is the editor of Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: Teaching Artists of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose and Iroquois elder Maurice Kenny's posthumous collection of poetry and prose, Monahsetah, Resistance, and Other Markings on Turtle's Back.