Ann Fisher-Wirth

Ann Fisher-Wirth and Dan Bellm

11 MAY 2023 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents An Evening of Poetry with poet and translator Dan Bellm, celebrating Counting, a chapbook, and his translation of Balam Rodrigo's Central American Book of the Dead, reading with Ann Fisher-Wirth, celebrating her new collection, Paradise is Jagged, in person, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 7:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).


Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.
Featured books for this event will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash(a small portion of the online proceeds will support the series).

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Dan Bellm's new poetry book is Counting. Molly Fisk says, "Counting offers us Dan Bellm's deft conversational tone and his blending of the deep and the quotidian, with mesmerizing cadences that carry us further into ourselves and further into the wider world, both accountable and accounted for." His 2023 translation from the Spanish is Central American Book of the Dead, by Balam Rodrigo. Dan Bellm is the author of four previous books of poetry, One Hand on the Wheel, Buried Treasure, winner of the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America and the CSU Poetry Center Prize, Practice, 2009 California Book Award-winner, and Deep Well. His translations from Spanish and French include Speaking in Song, by Pura López Colomé, and The Song of the Dead, by Pierre Reverdy, supported by an Artist's Fellowship in Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught literary translation and poetry in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles, Mills College, and New York University, and he serves as an interpreter for immigrants and asylum seekers with Centro Legal de la Raza, Oakland, California. Dan Bellm lives in Berkeley, California.

Ann Fisher-Wirth's new book of poems is Paradise is Jagged. Cyrus Cassells says of it "As a poet, Ann Fisher-Wirth is a steadfast wizard of telltale imagery and at-the-ready music…Fisher-Wirth's lyric concentration and attention to home, alive nature, and struggling humanity are that sacred and arrow-sure." She's authored six previous books of poems, including The Bones of Winter Birds and Mississippi, a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay. She also co-edited the acclaimed The Ecopoetry Anthology with Laura-Gray Street. Among her honors are two Fulbright awards and a 2023 Governor's Award for Excellence in Literature from the Mississippi Arts Commission. A senior fellow and board member of the Black Earth Institute, she recently retired from the University of Mississippi where she taught in the MFA program and directed the Environmental Studies program.