AN INVITATION TOWARD HOPE: NAOMI SHIHAB NYE & TRACY K. SMITH IN CONVERSATION – POETRY
As an invitation toward meaning and connection, National Book Award finalist and former Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith will discuss how celebrations of joy, family, and poetry in their new books are fundamental to our capacities to love, dream, question, and cultivate community.
In Grace Notes: Poems about Families, Nye celebrates family and community in her most personal work to date. With poems about her own childhood and school years, her parents and grandparents, and the people who have touched and shaped her life in so many ways, this is an emotional and sparkling collection to savor, share, and read again and again.
Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterized as “inaccessible,” “irrelevant,” or “intimidating.” In Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, she lifts the veil on her own creative process, and shows us how reading and writing poetry allows us to better confront life’s many uncertainties and losses, build camaraderie with strangers, and understand ourselves more fully. By reimagining and reexamining the age-old art form, Fear Less is a warm invitation to find meaning, consolation, and hope through poetry for poetry fans and newcomers to the art form.
Buy Grace Notes: Poems about Families – Nye
Buy Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times – Smith
