[College press release]

Frequency North, the aggressively eclectic visiting writers reading series at The College of Saint Rose, wraps up its fourth season with an evening of poetry read by Marilyn Nelson, former Poet Laureate of Connecticut, and Deborah Ager.

Nelson and Ager will read in the Standish Rooms of the Student Saint Rose on Thursday, April 23, at 7:30 p.m. in the College's Standish Rooms, which are on the second floor of the Events and Activities Center, 420 Western Avenue, Albany, NY. Copies of their latest works will be available for purchase and signing.

Frequency North is sponsored by The College of Saint Rose School of Arts and Humanities and is free and open to the public. The series will return for its fifth season in fall 2009. For more information, visit FrequencyNorth.com.

Marilyn Nelson's most recent books are Carver: A Life in Poems, Fortune's Bones, and A Wreath for Emmett Till, a book-length narrative poem about the 14-year-old black youth lynched 57 years ago in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The book made national headlines in 2007 when two teachers were fired from a Los Angeles charter school because they planned to have students read a poem about Emmett Till. Nelson's other books include The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the 1997 National Book Award, and the PEN Winship Award; Magnificat (1994); The Homeplace (1990), which won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award; Mama’s Promises (1985); and For the Body (1978); all published by Louisiana State University Press. She also has published two collections of verse for children: The Cat Walked through the Casserole and Other Poems for Children (with Pamela Espeland, 1984) and Halfdan Rasmussen's Hundreds of Hens and Other Poems for Children (1982), which she translated from Danish with Pamela Espeland. Nelson's honors include two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship, three National Book Award Finalist medals, the Poets' Prize, the Boston Globe/Hornbook Award, a Newbery Honor medal, two Coretta Scott King Honor medals, the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, the Lion and Unicorn Award for Excellence in Poetry for Young Adults, and the American Scandinavian Foundation Translation Award. Nelson is an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut and founder/director of Soul Mountain Retreat.

Deborah Ager's first book, Midnight Voices, a finalist for BOA Editions' A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize (judged by Edward Hirsch) will be published this spring by WordTech. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2006, Best of the Tigertail Anthologies, Writing Poems (2007), The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, The Bloomsbury Review, The Georgia Review, New Letters, Quarterly West, among other places. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Jenny McKean Moore workshop, and was a Tennessee Williams scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Since 2004, she has edited and published 32 Poems magazine, which publishes 64 poems per year. Poems from 32 Poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Best New Poets 2005 (edited by George Garrett), Best New Poets 2006 (edited by Eric Pankey) and online at Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Ager works as a search engine optimization expert, owns her own search engine marketing company and lives in Virginia with her husband and child.

Labels: Albany, Frequency North, poetry, Saint Rose, Shameless self-promotion

Thursday, April 16, 2009