Image
Photo by Carly Schneider
-
David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center at Pocantico
Tickets: $15 (+ $1.75 ticketing fee)
Feminist poets Jenny Xie, Cynthia Manick, and Jennifer Franklin celebrate National Poetry Month with a reading and Q&A. These readings will be drawn from their new books, which grapple with thorny political issues—both current and historical—and examine how the past and present exist together.
In The Rupture Tense, Xie examines the silence surrounding the Cultural Revolution and explores its lasting impact on her own family. Manick’s No Sweet Without Brine is an elegiac ode to Black womanhood in four parts, both soulful and celebratory. In Franklin’s third collection, If Some God Shakes Your House, she imagines an Antigone who is ferocious, feeling, and unafraid of the consequences of speaking about the political atrocities she has witnessed and the personal trauma she has withstood.
There will be a book signing after the event, with each of the poets’ new collections available for purchase from The Village Bookstore of Pleasantville.
The event will be followed by a reception with special access to the DR Center gallery, currently showing Inspired Encounters: Women Artists and the Legacies of Modern Art.
Co-presented in partnership with the Hudson Valley Writers Center (HVWC).
Jennifer Franklin
Jennifer Franklin has published three books, most recently If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023). A recipient of an NYFA/City Corps Grant in Poetry and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation Grant, her work has been published widely including in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion. She teaches in Manhattanville’s MFA program and at HVWC, where she serves as program director.
Cynthia Manick
Cynthia Manick is author of No Sweet Without Brine and Blue Hallelujahs, editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, and a storyteller and performer. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and MacDowell Colony, among others. Winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, Manick also founded the reading series Soul Sister Revue. She currently serves on the board of the International Women’s Writing Guild and the editorial board of Alice James Books.
Jenny Xie
Jenny Xie was born in Anhui province, China. She is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the author of Eye Level, which received the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, and The Rupture Tense. Xie has been supported by Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Kundiman, and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. She has taught at Princeton, NYU, and Bard College.