Join us for an in-person afternoon with award-winning poets Andrea Cohen and Heather Treseler who will read and engage in a Q & A about their inspirations and craft.
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Andrea Cohen reads from her eighth book of poetry, The Sorrow Apartments (Four Way Books, 2024). “You keep looking at the poem while it glances at you sidelong, half turning away, half looking back, daring you to try again. In other words, it’s witty. It’s also moving, because it puts in play real stakes: what it means to be a person, what it means to lose a world. The gamesmanship creates the emotional heft.” – David Orr for The New York Times
Cohen’s other collections include Everything (Four Way, 2021), Nightshade (Four Way, 2019), Unfathoming (Four Way, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999).
Her poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere.
Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train’s Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at MacDowell. Over the years, she has taught at The University of Iowa, Emerson College, UMASS-Boston, Boston University, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Merrimack College, where she was the founding director of the Writers’ House. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA, and taught at Boston University in the spring of 2024. https://www.andreacohen.org/
Heather Treseler reads from her debut collection Auguries & Divinations (Bauhan, 2024) which tracks a young woman’s coming of age, attuned to the unspoken liabilities of women’s lives, the suburban underworld, and the energies of eros. The narrator claims a life of her own making, drawing on the classical practice of augury, or observing birds to discern human fate. The book won the prestigious 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and has received reviews from the Boston Globe, the Poetry Foundation, LitHub, and Worcester Magazine, among others. Auguries & Divinations is one of five finalists for the 2024 Massachusetts Book Award in poetry.
Among the notable poets who have praised her work, Frank Bidart wrote: “It has been years since I have read a new poet of such rhetorical sophistication and mastery. Wow. One thinks of the young Robert Lowell. Rhetorical mastery fueled by fury and necessity. Agony shaped and released by intelligence, by art. A breathtaking debut.”
Treseler is also the author of Parturition (Southword, 2020) which received the 2019 chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Irish Times, JAMA, and The Iowa Review, among other journals.
Her work has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as residencies at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center, the Boston Athenaeum, and the T. S. Eliot House. Recipient of the George I. Alden award for Excellence in Teaching, she is professor of English at Worcester State University. https://www.heathertreseler.com/
This program is made possible by the generous support of the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, a patron-supported non-profit organization.
For more information about the Concord Festival of Authors, please visit www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.
