Celebrating the National Poetry Series and the 2015 Winners with Founder Daniel Halpern

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to recognize and promote excellence in contemporary poetry by ensuring the publication of five books of poetry annually through participating publishers. In addition, the National Poetry Series has partnered with Miami Book Fair to award the Paz Prize in Poetry and bilingual publication for a book of poems written in Spanish. This event will gather the six winners of the 2015 prizes. Moderated by Denise Duhamel.

Joshua Bennett’s mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, The Sobbing School, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. In his latest chapbook, Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last: Self-Portrait as Missing Person, Justin Boening liberates himself from himself.  Jennifer Kronovet‘s The Wug Test is a collection of language-driven poetry that combines lyric facts with the scientific imagination. The dreamlike geography of the thread, the labyrinth, and the Minotaur’s legends are revisited in Nine Coins/Nueve monedas, Carlos Pintado’s latest collection of poetry, winner of the 2015 Paz Prize for Poetry, presented by the National Poetry Series and Miami Book Fair. Melissa Range’s Scriptorium is a collection of poems that explores questions of religious and linguistic authority, from medieval England to contemporary Appalachia. The poems in Danniel Schoonebeek’s Trébuchet are at once combative and incendiary, tackling contemporary politics. Moderator Denise Duhamel‘s poetry collection, Blowout, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is both a celebration and mourning of romantic love.