Maxine Chernoff

Gloria Frym and Maxine Chernoff

4 MAY 2025 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading featuring Gloria Frym, Lies & More Lies, and Maxine Chernoff, Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).


Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series. The featured books will be available for signing at the event and some will be available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Gloria Frym's new book is Lies & More Lies. Maxine Chernoff says, "What a profound and often moving bearer of witness. And in capturing the single notes of language that explain us, Frym creates a symphony for our terrible moment, a 2024 addition to "Adagio for Strings," alive with caution and hope. Read this book—It will help you learn that words laced with honesty are the highest form to which writing may aspire." Her previous collections include The Stage Stop Model, Mind Over Matter, and Homeless at Home, recipient of an American Book Award, among others. She is also author of How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays; Second Stories, a book of interviews with women artists; and two critically acclaimed short story collections, Distance No Object and How I Learned She is the recipient of The Fund for Poetry Award, Walter & Elise Haas Creative Work Fund Grant, San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award, and California Arts Council grants to teach poetry writing to jail inmates. She lives in Berkeley.
Maxine Chernoff's most recent book is Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the 2Northern California Book Award. May-Lee Chai says, "Maxine Chernoff is a wordsmith par excellence. Her new collection covers political turmoil, pandemic anxiety, and matters of the heart and body, while finding language for our fractious times. Chernoff 's poems are indeed 'lacing the world in / tangled sound and / string.'" Her poetry collections include Here; World: Poems; Leap Year Day: New and Selected Poems; New Faces of 1952, winner of the Carl Sandburg Award; Utopia TV Store: Prose Poems; and Vegetable Emergency, among others. She is also the author of a book of stories, Sign of Devotion, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a PEN Center USA Translation Award for her translations, with Paul Hoover, of the work of Friedrich Hölderlin. A special issue of the Denver Quarterly was recently devoted to her work, and a book about her work is forthcoming from MadHat Press in 2025. She lives in Mill Valley, California.