Campbell McGrath and Sharon Olds: A Reading and Conversation

Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares, among other prominent publications, and his poetry is represented in dozens of anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University. Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs (Ecco) brings together thirty-five years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America’s most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he’s headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work—lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, “An Odyssey of Appetite,” exploring America’s limitless material and spiritual hungers. Nothing is too large or small to remain untouched by McGrath’s voracious intellect and deep empathy—everything from Japanese eggplant to a can of Schaefer beer to the smokestacks of Chicago comes in for a close and perceptive look even as McGrath crosses borders and boundaries, investigating the enduring human experiences of love and loss.

Emmy award-winning journalist, Jeffrey Brown is the Chief Correspondent for Arts, Culture, and Society at PBS the NewsHour. He has interviewed artists and writers in addition to reporting from the field. His work has taken him all over the world, from Haiti to Myanmar as he searches for the connections between news and poetry. He is the creator and host of “Art Beat,” which is the NewsHour’s online arts and culture blog. As a producer and a correspondent, his work has earned him an Emmy, five Cine Golden Eagle Awards, and other honors. In Brown’s debut poetry collection, The News (Copper Canyon Press), he re-imagines and re-tells his experiences through poems that explore stories he’s covered, places he’s gone, people he’s met, the thrills and doubts of his profession, as well as the profound intimacy of family.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap, she is the author of eleven previous books of poetry and the winner of many other honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead and the Living. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In Arias, Olds gives us radical new poems of intimate life, political conscience, race, class, and a mother’s violence.