Craft Lecture with Gregory Pardlo (via Zoom)

The Hudson Valley Writers Center is proud to present a monthly craft series featuring five award-winning poets & beloved professors. Each poet will share the insights about craft that they have gleaned from decades of devoting themsleves to studying the art of poetry. Unlike a workshop environment that prioritizes student work and student-led conversation in one-off or weekly sessions, these monthly lectures will provide the much-desired chance to listen to some of today’s most renowned writers’ valuable wisdom, uninterrupted, and spaced out intentionally over the course of five months.  

NB: These lectures will take place on Zoom from 7-8pm EST. You will receive the link when you register and again the day before each lecture.

We encourage you to join us for all five lectures at the discounted rate of $500. You can also purchase each class individually for $150 per lecture.

Gregory Pardlo is the author of the poetry collections Spectral Evidence and Digest, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem, winner of the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize, and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays.  His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a faculty member of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-University-Camden and Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden.  He is currently a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. (March 20)

The entire group is deiscunted through January 30. Here are the other lectures in the series.

Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection, The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Her latest collection of poetry is Life On Earth, was released in January of 2024 and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Finger Exercises for Poets, a book of concise craft essays and exercises for poets was released in July 2024. (January 30)

Afaa M. Weaver is a poet, playwright, and translator. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, most recently A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen Press, 2023). Other recent books include Spirit Boxing (Pitt Poetry Series, 2017); City of Eternal Spring (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), winner of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award; The Government of Nature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985-2005 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). Described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr as “one of the most significant poets writing today,” Weaver’s many honors include four Pushcart prizes, inclusion in Best American Poetry (2014, 2015), The May Sarton Award, a Pew Fellowship, a Fulbright scholarship to teach at National Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts, and the Gold Friendship Medal from the Beijing Writers’ Association. As a playwright, in addition to an NEA fellowship, he won the PDI award in playwriting from the ETA Creative Arts Foundation in Chicago for his play Elvira and the Lost Prince. Some of his poetry has been translated into Arabic and Chinese, and, having studied at the Taipei Language Institute in Taiwan, Weaver himself has done translation and written poems of his own in Chinese. The son of a sharecropper, he grew up in working class Baltimore, did a stint in the Army, and spent fifteen years as a factory worker, during which time he wrote intermittently and founded Seventh Son Press and the literary journal Blind Alleys. After 10 years of work on his first book, Weaver released Water Song in 1985, and won an NEA fellowship in the same year. Weaver’s early work was influenced by the Black Arts Movement, and his later poems have been compared by the Los Angeles Review of Books to the “personal, historic, epic, and spiritual” journey of Dante’s Divine Comedy “into the depths of human experience and suffering, and then back up and out.” Weaver was the first African American poet to serve as Poet in Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center, and has also taught at NYU, City University of New York, Seton Hall Law School, Rutgers University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and he held an Endowed Chair at Simmons College for twenty years. He has been on the faculty at Cave Canem since its inception and in 1998 became Cave Canem’s first Elder. Afaa and his wife Kristen live in a small farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. (February 27)

Jane Hirshfield, in poems described by The Washington Post as belonging “among the modern masters” and in The New York Times Magazine as “among the most important poetry in the world today,” addresses the urgent immediacies of our time. Ranging from the political, ecological, and scientific to the metaphysical, personal, and passionate, Hirshfield praises the radiance of particularity and reckons the consequence of the daily. Her poems and essays traverse the crises of the biosphere, questions of social justice, and the myriad interior quandaries of heart, mind, and spirit. Her work lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, desire and loss, impermanence and beauty— all the dimensions of our shared existence within what one poem calls “the pure democracy of being.” Her ten poetry books include the newly published The Asking: New & Selected Poems (September, 2023); Ledger (March, 2020), The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times. Her two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), have become classics in their field, as have her four books collecting and co-translating the work of world 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 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; The Poetry Center Book Award, The California Book Award, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, the Zhongkun International Poetry Award, and the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, in conjunction with reading to an estimated 50,000 people on the Washington Mall at the first March For Science, she co-founded the Poets For Science traveling installation, housed with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Orion, and ten editions of The Best American Poems. Hirshfield has taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Bennington College, Queen’s University Belfast, and elsewhere. Her frequent appearances at universities, writers’ conferences, symposia and festivals in this country and abroad are highly acclaimed. Her poems and essays have been translated into over fifteen languages and her work has been set by numerous composers, including John Adams and Philip Glass. Her TED-ED animated lesson on metaphor has received over 1.5 million views. (April 24)

Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry, including Modern Poetry (finalist for the National Book Award); frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Prize; Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Seuss was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home. (May 22)