Join us in celebrating National Poetry Month with the meditative and empathic Nadia Colburn and Sandra Lim. The poets will read and engage in a Q & A, followed by book signings and light refreshments.
Nadia Colburn reads from her new collection, I Say the Sky (University Press of Kentucky 2024). She is also the author of The High Shelf (The Word Works Press 2019). Her poetry and prose have appeared in more than eighty publications, including The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Spirituality & Health, Lion’s Roar, and the The Yale Review. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and is the founder of Align Your Story Writing School, which brings traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children. Find her at nadiacolburn.com, where she offers meditations and free resources for writers.
Colburn’s profound and accessible I Say the Sky finds splendor and astonishment in a natural world – and a human world – that is deeply troubled yet still majestically beautiful. Both elegy and celebration, it addresses some of the most challenging aspects of human existence, from childhood trauma to environmental devastation, and discovers, in unexpected and clear-sighted ways, wisdom, wonder, and peace.
Sandra Lim reads from her latest collection, The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton 2021). Her previous books are The Wilderness (W.W. Norton 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück, and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press 2006). She has received the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and the Levis Reading Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Baffler, Gulf Coast, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and also serves on the poetry faculty in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Born in Seoul, Korea, she lives in Cambridge, MA. Visit her at https://sandralimpoet.com.
Lim’s The Curious Things offers compelling meditations on love, art making, solitude, female fate, and both the mundane and serious principles of life. Lim’s lucidity and tenderness form a striking complement to her remarkable metaphors and the emotional clamor of her material. Animated by a sense of reckoning and a piercing inwardness, these anti-sentimental poems nevertheless celebrate the passionate and empathetic subjective life.
This program is made possible by the generous support of the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, a patron-supported non-profit organization.
