The Language of Women: A Poetry Reading

Deborah Landau is the author of four collections of poetry. Her third, The Uses of the Body, was featured on NPR's All Things Considered and named one of 12 Favorite Poetry Books of 2015 by The New Yorker, one of the “16 Best Poetry Books of 2015″ by BuzzFeed, a “Book We Can’t Wait to Read” by Vogue, and in the top “8 New Books to Savor” by O, the Oprah Magazine. She is also the author of the Last Usable Hour and Orchidelirium, which was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye to win the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and The New York Times, and her poems have been widely anthologized. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, she is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Landau's fourth book of poetry, Soft Targets (Copper Canyon Press), draws a bullseye on humanity's vulnerable flesh and corrupted world. In this ambitious lyric sequence, the speaker's fear of annihilation expands beyond the self to an imperiled planet on which all inhabitants are "soft targets."

Keetje Kuipers is the author of the poetry collections The Keys to the Jail and Beautiful in the Mouth, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Lucas Artist Residency, the Jentel Artist Residency Foundation, and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, among others. She is a faculty member at Hugo House in Seattle, Washington, and senior editor at Poetry Northwest. Kuipers’s latest collection, All Its Charms (BOA Editions) is a fearless and transformative reckoning of identity. By turns tender and raw, these poems chronicle Kuipers’ decision to become a single mother by choice, her marriage to the woman she first fell in love with more than a decade before giving birth to her daughter, and her family’s struggle to bring another child into their lives.

Stephanie Strickland was born in Detroit. She earned a BA at Harvard University, an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and an MS at Pratt Institute. She is the author of numerous poetry books, including Dragon Logic (2013), Zone : Zero (2008), True North (1997), and Give the Body Back (1991). She edited What’s Become of Eden: Poems of Family at Century’s End (1994) and coedited, with Anneliese Wagner, River Poems (1992). Strickland’s poetry was included in Best American Poetry 2013, edited by Denise Duhamel. To the question posed, to Job, as obviously unanswerable--have you seen to the edge of the universe?-- Strickland's poems answer, we can, we have. Strickland probes the shape-shifting (reformatted) body and tests our changing (reconfigured) capability of caring for others as she expresses grief for historic, mystic, and mythic women; for women who burn, in space, at the stake, and as they sweep; for her mother and only daughter. Job is asked, Where is the road to light? In these poems collected in How the Universe is Made: New and Selected Poems 1985-2019 (Ahsahta Press) gathered from a lifetime of writing open to history, to code, to mathematics and matter as these translate each other, an abundance of pointers: no road that is not a road to light.  

Tina Chang is a poet, teacher, and editor. In 2010, she was the first woman to be named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and she continues to serve in this role. Chang received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of the poetry collections Of Gods & Strangers, and Half-Lit Houses. and the co-editor of the seminal anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond.  In her latest collection, Hybrida (W. W. Norton), Chang confronts the complexities of raising a mixed-race child during an era of political upheaval in the United States. She ruminates on the relationship between her son’s blackness and his safety, exploring the dangers of childhood in a post–Trayvon Martin era and invoking racialized roles in fairy tales.