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  • Fall Poetry Festival

    Do you write poetry? Have you considered writing or translating poetry? Do you love language and its ability to engage in meaningful exploration? Monmouth University and the Long Branch Arts Council invite you to a series of workshops in poetry, lyrical essay, and translation of poetry; readings by acclaimed writers; lunch & discussion, and a reading by registered participants.

    On Friday, October 31, 11:30-1:00, poet Judith Vollmer will offer a master class/workshop (“The Transfer: How a Poem Reveals Hidden Gifts”) in Wilson 311.

    Workshop leaders and readers for the November 8th day-long fest: Gabor Barabas, Michael Broek, Natalie Diaz, Prescott Evarts, Jr., Melissa Febos, Carmen Firan, Marisa Frasca, Laura McCullough, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Suzanne Parker, Michael Waters, and Dan Weeks.

    Admission to readings is free and open to the public. The workshops, also free, will be open to registrants only: for more information and to register, email Sara Rimassa at monmouthreview@gmail.com (“Poetry Fest” in subject line) no later than Tue, October 28th.

    This event is co-sponsored by the Long Branch Arts Council, the City of Long Branch, Investors Bank Foundation, Monmouth Arts/ArtHelps, the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University, the Department of English at Monmouth University, and The Monmouth Review.

    Saturday, November 8th, 2014, Bey Hall (Monmouth University), 9:00-5:00

    9:00-9:45 Sign-in for registrants in Bey Hall (refreshments)

    9:45-10:00 Welcome (Gabor Barabas and Mihaela Moscaliuc) and workshop    information

    10-11:30 Workshops

    11:30-12:30 Lunch discussion for registrants: The Monmouth Review information session; Q & A about submission & editorial process with poet Dan Weeks, editor of This Broken Shore.

    12:30-1:20 Reading:  Gabor Barabas, Michael Broek, Natalie Diaz, Prescott Evarts, Jr., Melissa Febos, and Dan Weeks

    1:30-3:00 Workshops

    3:00-4:00 Reading: Carmen Firan, Marisa Frasca, Laura McCullough, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Suzanne Parker, and Michael Waters.

    4:00-5:00 Reading by registered festival participants

  • Visiting Writer: Alex Gilvarry

    Alex Gilvarry is the author of the novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant (Viking). He was selected as a “5 Under 35” nominee by the National Book Foundation in 2014 and received the Hornblower Award at the 2012 New York City Book Awards. He has been a Norman Mailer fellow and a visiting scholar at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. His essays and criticism have appeared in Vogue, The Nation, Boston Globe, and have been broadcast on NPR’s All Things Considered. His next novel, Eastman Was Here, is forthcoming from Viking/Penguin in 2016. He is the Artist-in-Residence at Monmouth University where he teaches creative writing.

  • Visiting Writer: Ed Hirsch

    Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy that The New Yorker called “a masterpiece of sorrow.”  He has also written five prose books, among them A Poet’s Glossary (2014), a complete compendium of poetic terms, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller.  He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.  He taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston for seventeen years.  He now serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

    More information: www.edwardhirsch.com

  • Visiting Writer: Jane Hirshfield

    Jane Hirshfield’s poetry speaks to the central issues of human existence—desire and loss, impermanence and beauty, the many dimensions of our connection with others and the wider community of creatures and objects with which we share our lives. Demonstrating with quiet authority what it means to awaken into the full capacities of attention, her work sets forth a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Described by The New York Times as “radiant and passionate” and by other reviewers as “ethically aware,” “insightful and eloquent,” and as conveying “succinct wisdom,” her subjects range from the metaphysical and passionate to the political, ecological, and scientific to subtle unfoldings of daily life and experience. Her book of essays on the “mind of poetry” and her several collections presenting and co-translating the work of poets from the past have become classics in their fields. An intimate, profound, and generous master of her art, Hirshfield has taught at UC Berkeley, Duke University, Bennington College, and elsewhere, and her many appearances at writers’ conferences and literary festivals in this country and abroad have been highly acclaimed.

    Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight collections of poetry, including the newly published The Beauty (Knopf, 2015); Come, Thief; After (shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize and named a “best book of 2006” by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Financial Times); Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award); The Lives of the Heart; and The October Palace, as well as two  books of essays, the newly published Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015) and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She has also edited and co-translated four books containing the work of poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Japanese Court; Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women; Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems; and The Heart of Haiku, on Matsuo Basho, named an Amazon Best Book of 2011.

    Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; and (both twice) The California Book Award and the Northern California Book Reviewers Award. In 2012 she was received the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry.

    Hirshfield’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, Harper’s, The Nation, Orion, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, eight editions of The Best American Poetry, five Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and many other publications.  Her work frequently appears on Garrison Keillor’s “Writers Almanac” program and she has been featured in two Bill Moyers PBS television specials. In fall 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

  • Visiting Writer: Laura Kasischke

    Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels.  She was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for her collection SPACE, IN CHAINS (Copper Canyon Press, 2011).  She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rilke Award for Poetry, the Bess Hokin Award from POETRY magazine, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.  She is teaches in the MFA Program and the Residential College at the University of Michigan, from which she graduated.  She lives with her husband and son in Chelsea, Michigan.

    More information: www.laurakasischke.com

  • Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy

    Director/ Producer: Haydn Reiss 

    Beginning in 1994, Reiss has made a series of documentaries on writers and poets, including William Stafford & Robert Bly: A Literary Friendship and the award-winning Rumi: Poet of the Heart, which was narrated by Debra Winger. Both films aired on PBS.

    In 2005, Reiss produced, How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff’ Professor Lakoff, a noted expert in linguistics and political language, is showcased in a tightly knit program that explains how modern politics is waged through ideas like “framing” the debate, the way a party’s “values” influence voters and much more. At that time only the political right had made use of these cognitive techniques to gain political power and the film was made in response to that imbalance.

    Reiss’ 2009 film, Every War Has Two Losers, a look at poet William Stafford’s years as a conscientious objector, was a 2011 winner at the Canadian International Film Festival and an official selection of the 2011 United National Film Festival. 

    2015 brought the completion of Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy, the first feature documentary profile of the prolific and controversial poet and activist. Featuring Martin Sheen, Gary Snyder Mark Rylance, Jane Hirshfield, Philip Levine and many others from the world of art and literature. It is set for a PBS broadcast next year. 

    In a previous life Haydn worked as  assistant on the psychological thriller Jacob Ladder and as assistant to the producer Alex Ho on Oliver Stone’s JFK.

    Mr. Reiss has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota Film & TV, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the Westcliff Foundation and others.

    There will be a Q&A with the filmmaker, Haydn Reiss, following the screening. This event is sponsored by the Visiting Writers Series and Jewish Cultural Studies.

  • Visiting Writers: The Breakbeat Poets

    Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture.

    The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who’ve never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.

    The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

  • Visiting Writers: Gerald Stern

    Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1925 and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University.  He is the author of 16 books of poetry, including, most recently, Divine Nothingness (Norton, 2014) and In Beauty Bright (Norton, 2012), as well as This Time:  New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award and a kind-of memoir of a year in 85 sections titled Stealing History, was published by Trinity University Press in the spring of 2012.  Stern was awarded the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets, was the 2010 recipient of the Medal of Honor in Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was inducted into the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the 2012 recipient of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.  He was the 2014 winner of the Frost Medal. Stern has two books coming out in 2017, a poetry collection from W. W. Norton called Galaxy Love and a book of non-fiction titled Deathwatch, to be released by Trinity University Press.

  • Visiting Writers: Liz Moore

    Liz Moore is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction.
Her first novel, The Words of Every Song (Broadway Books, 2007), centers on a fictional record company in New York City just after the turn of the millennium. It draws partly on Liz’s own experiences as a musician. It was selected for Borders’ Original Voices program and was given a starred review by Kirkus.Roddy Doyle wrote of it, “This is a remarkable novel, elegant, wise, and beautifully constructed. I loved the book.”

After the publication of her debut novel, Liz obtained her MFA in Fiction from Hunter College. In 2009, she was awarded the University of Pennsylvania’s ArtsEdge residency and moved to Philadelphia, where she still lives. She is now an Assistant Professor of Writing at Holy Family University.

Her second novel, Heft, was published by W.W. Norton in January 2012 to popular and critical acclaim. Of Heft, The New Yorker wrote, “Moore’s characters are lovingly drawn…a truly original voice”; The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Few novelists of recent memory have put our bleak isolation into words as clearly as Liz Moore does in her new novel”; and editor Sara Nelson wrote in O, The Oprah Magazine, “Beautiful…Stunningly sad and heroically hopeful.” The novel was published in five countries, was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was included on several “Best of 2012” lists, including those of NPR and the Apple iBookstore.

Moore’s short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in venues such as Tin House, The New York Times, and Narrative Magazine. She is the winner of the Medici Book Club Prize and Philadelphia’s Athenaeum Literary Award. After winning a 2014 Rome Prize in Literature, she spent 2014-15 at the American Academy in Rome, completing her third novel.

    That novel, The Unseen World, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. in July 2016.

  • Visiting Writers: Colm Toibin

    Colm Toibin is the author of eight novels, including ‘The Master’ and ‘Brooklyn’, and two collections of stories. His play ‘The Testament of Mary’ was nominated for a Tony Award for best play in 2013. He is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.