Watch Nick Flynn read at the 2008 Poetry Festival.

Massachusetts poet Nick Flynn will be one of three Featured Readers at Lowell High School Freshman Academy on Friday, October 10 at 7 p.m. Flynn will read alongside poets Rhina Espaillat and Regie Gibson, who round out the evening’s line-up.

Nick Flynn’s “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City” (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, “Some Ether” (Graywolf, 2000), and “Blind Huber” (Graywolf, 2002), for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include “field poet” and artistic collaborator on the film “Darwin’s Nightmare,” which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. One semester a year he teaches at the University of Houston, and he then spends the rest of the year elsewhere.

Visit Nick Flynn at www.nickflynn.org.

JOSEPH TORRA

Joseph Torra is a poet, novelist, and editor. His books of fiction include the My Ground Trilogy and The Bystander’s Scrapbook. His poetry books include Keep Watching the Sky and After the Chinese. He edited and introduced Stephen Jonas’ Selected Poems, and co-edited Through This Suspended Vacuum: Poems for John Wieners (with William Corbett and Michael Gizzi). From 1990 to 1996, he edited lift magazine. He is presently on the editorial board at Pressed Wafer Press. In 2006, Quale Press published his novel They Say. His chapbook titled My Word of Mouth was published in 2007.

Called“the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published sixteen books in all as a poet, editor and translator. His eighth book of poems, The Republic of Poetry, was published by Norton in 2006, received the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize,  the Premio Fronterizo, two NEA Fellowships, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s and The Nation.  He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). His work has been translated into ten languages. A former tenant lawyer in Boston, Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.

Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932. She has lived in the United States since 1939 and taught high school English in New York City for several years. Espaillat writes poetry and prose both in English and in her native Spanish. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Lyric, Poetry, Sparrow, Orbis, The Formalist, and The American Scholar, as well as some forty anthologies. Espaillat has eight poetry collections in print, including Where Horizons Go, which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence, which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; and most recently, Playing at Stillness. In 2004 she became the first winner of the Tree at My Window Award from the Robert Frost Foundation for her Spanish translations of Robert Frost and her English translations of Saint John of the Cross and César Sánchez Beras. That same year she also received the Dominican Republic’s Salome Ureña de Henríquez Award for service to Dominican culture and education.

Espaillat lives in Newburyport, MA, with her husband Alfred Moskowitz, a sculptor. For 14 years, she coordinated the Newburyport Art Association’s Annual Poetry Contest, is on the planning committee of the Newburyport Literary Festival, and is a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets. She has also been instrumental in bringing about bilingual poetry readings in the area north of Boston, and has assisted teachers Debbie Szabo and César Sánchez Beras with the planning for bilingual activities shared by high school students of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Newburyport.

Marjorie Agosín is a Professor of Spanish at Wellesley College where she teaches courses in Spanish language and Latin American literature. She has been a member of the faculty since 1982.

Professor Agosín earned a B.A. degree at the University of Georgia (1976), and an M.A. at Indiana University (1977). She completed her Ph.D. at Indiana University in 1982. Recently, she received the Letras de Oro 1995 prize for poetry. Presented by Spain’s Ministry of Culture and the North-South Center of the University of Miami to a writer of Hispanic heritage living in the United States, the Letras de Oro recognizes both the creativity of the recipients and the importance of Spanish language in the United States today. She also won the 1995 Latino Literature Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Latin American Writers Institute. This prestigious prize was awarded for her book Toward the Splendid City (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1994).

Marjorie Agosín is a well-known spokesperson for the plight and priorities of women in Third World countries. Her book, Scraps of Life: Chilean Arpilleras (Red Sea Press, 1987, translated by Cola Franzen), tells of Chilean women who make their struggles known to the world through the exposition of “arpilleras,” folk tapestries which tell of their bravery and hardships in the face of oppression. Money from the sale of these handicrafts aids them in supporting families in which the men have been arrested, murdered, or have simply “disappeared.” Her concern for women in Chile has also been the focus feature articles in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor,Ms. Magazine, and the Barnard Occasional Papers on Women’s Issues.

Her most recent book is A Cross and A Star (University of New Mexico Press, 1995), a memoir of her mother’s childhood as a Jewish immigrant in a German community in Chile before, during and after World War II. Another manuscript, Noche Estrellada, about the life of Vincent Van Gogh, will be published by the North-South Center in 1996.

In recognition of her deep social concerns and accomplishments, Marjorie Agosín received a Good Neighbor Award in 1988 at the 31st annual awards celebration hosted by the Northeastern Region of The National Conference of Christians and Jews.

The first of her seven books of poetry to appear with English translations, Brujas y algo mas: Witches and Other Things (1984), is available from Latin American Literary Review Press in Pittsburgh.

She has also published poems in Nosotras: Latina Literature Today, (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, N.Y., 1986). Marjorie Agosín is the author of a work of criticism on the Chilean author, Maria Luisa Bombal (Senda Nueva de Additions, 1983), and articles concerning Latin American women writers appearing in such publications as Cuadernos Americanos, Arbor: Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura, andLatin American Theater Review.

Ed Sanders was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He dropped out of the University of Missouri in 1958 and hitchhiked to New York City’s Greenwich Village. He wrote his first major poem, Poem from Jail, on toilet paper in his cell after being jailed for protesting against nuclear proliferation in 1961.

In 1962, he founded the avant-garde journal, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore (147 Avenue A in what was then the Lower East Side), which became a gathering place for bohemians and radicals.

Sanders graduated from New York University in 1964, with a degree in Classics. In 1965, he founded The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg. The band broke up in 1969 and reformed in 1984.

In 1971, Sanders wrote The Family, a profile of the events leading up to the Tate-LaBianca murders. He obtained access to the Manson Family by posing as a “Satanic guru-maniac and dope-trapped psychopath.”

As of 2006, Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York where he publishes the Woodstock Journal with his wife of over 36 years, the writer and painter Miriam R. Sanders. He also invents musical instruments including the Talking Tie, the microtonal Microlyre and the Lisa Lyre, a musical contraption involving light-activated switches and a reproduction of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

United States Poet Laureate (1997–2000)

Translator, Essayist, and Teacher

Robert Pinsky’s first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism, and such national enthusiasm in response, that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world.

As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky became a public ambassador for poetry, founding the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans — of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state — shared their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry had a vigorous presence in the American cultural landscape. The project sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry. The anthology Americans’ Favorite Poems, which include letters from project participants, is in its eighteenth printing. The new anthology, An Invitation to Poetry, comes with a DVD featuring twenty-seven of the FPP video segments, as seen on PBS.

Elegant and tough, vividly imaginative, Pinsky’s poems have earned praise for their wild musical energy and ambitious range. His book Gulf Music (2007) is his seventh volume of poetry. His The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. In May 2006 his chapbook entitled First Things to Handwas published. His most recent book is Gulf Music.

Pinsky’s books about poetry include Poetry and the World, nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, The Sounds of Poetry, and more recently, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. Pinsky contends that, though intimate, poetry addresses cultural needs by communicating a shared set of social meanings, a paradox that becomes part of his effort to demonstrate the complexity of American poetry.

Robert Pinsky’s landmark, best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. He is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Pinsky’s prose book, The Life of David, is a lively retelling and examination of the David stories, narrating a wealth of legend as well as scripture.

The poetry editor for the online magazine Slate, for seven years Pinsky appeared regularly on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He writes the weekly “Poet’s Choice” column for the Washington Post. He was elected in 1999 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Pinsky’s poems appear in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review, and frequently in The Best American Poetryanthologies. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. Robert Pinsky is also the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s 2006 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award in Literary Arts. He is one of the few members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on “The Simpsons.”

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“Pinsky is our finest living specimen of this sadly rare breed, and the poems of “Gulf Music” are among the best examples we have of poetry’s ability to illuminate not only who we are as humans, but who we are — and can be — as a nation.”
— The New York Times Book Review

“In his poems Pinsky talks, with democratic warmth and intimacy, to the common things of this world. His extraordinary poems remind us that he has always embodied the very ideal he proposes for what a poet can do.”
— Lloyd Schwarz, The Boston Phoenix

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Source: http://www.barclayagency.com/pinsky.html

Lucie Brock-Broido was born and raised in Pittsburgh. She received her B.A. and her M.A. from Johns Hopkins University, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her books of poetry include Trouble in Mind (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), The Master Letters (1995), and A Hunger (1988).

In a New York Times review of Brock-Broido’s most recent collection, Maureen N. McLane writes: “Apprenticed to Wallace Stevens, from whose notebooks she takes the titles of several poems, she writes a sensual, sonically rich poetry, typified by the opening of “Spain”: ‘The god-leash leaves / Its lashes on the broad bunched backs / Of sacrificial animals.’ This acoustic gorgeousness, along with her highly figurative cast of mind, creates a striking tension: her new theme is austerity, yet her means remain profligate.”

Her awards and honors include the Witter-Bynner prize of Poetry from the Academy of American Arts and Letters, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Brock-Broido has taught at Bennington College, Princeton University, and at Harvard University as the director of the creative writing program and as Briggs-Copeland Poet. She is now the director of poetry in the Writing Division in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and divides her time between New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Watch Regie Gibson reading at the 2008 Poetry Festival.

Poet, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator Regie Gibson has performed, taught, and lectured at schools, universities, theaters and various other venues on two continents and in seven countries, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University’s Longfellow Hall for the Cambridge Poetry Festival, and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater’s award-winning Traffic Series with David Amram, which included a collaboration with Jack Kerouac & Allen Ginsberg. He has worked with artists such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Yosef Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, The Last Poets, Amiri Baraka, Kurt Vonnegut, members of the world famous Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and Hip Hop artist Mos Def. He has taught, lectured and facilitated workshops for the Cambridge Poetry Festival at Harvard University, the Poetry Center of the Art Institute of Chicago, Detroit Black Writers Guild, and the University of Chicago Lab School. In 1998, Gibson was the National Poetry Slam Individual Champion and won the Chicago Tribune’s Artist of the Year for Excellence for his poetry. In 1999, Regie founded the Church of The Funky Word, a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing ancient, contemporary and original literary text combined with world music and rituals from various world cultures. Widely published in anthologies, magazines and journals, he released his first full-length book of poetry, Storms Beneath The Skin (EM Press) in 2001. He partnered with renowned percussionist and composer Kahil El Zabar (composer of the musical The Lion King) for his own piece “Hey Nappyhead,” which appeared in the New Line Cinema film Love Jones, based largely on events in his life.