Please join the MWPA and SPACE as we help launch Cate Marvin’s fourth book, Event Horizon, which is being released by Copper Canyon Press. Marvin will be joined in conversation by award-winning writer Bill Roorbach, and award-winning poets Myronn Hardy and Betsy Sholl will also share their poems. Poet Colin Cheney will provide music, and Kelly’s Books to Go will sell books.
The poet Terrance Hayes writes, ““Sometimes Cate Marvin seems to be speaking directly to me: a poet who loves the language she loves. Her poems are made of sentient sentences. She channels the intensities of a present woman. Present being equal to nowness, witness, existence. This is simply a stunning collection.”
Cate Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. She co-edited with poet Michael Dumanis the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award, was published by Sarabande in 2007. Her third book of poems, Oracle, published by W.W. Norton & Co., was named one of “The Best Poetry Books of 2015” by The New York Times. Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Scarborough.
Bill Roorbach is the author of the novel, Lucky Turtle, which was released in April by Algonquin. Five previous books of fiction, including The Girl of the Lake, the Kirkus Prize finalist The Remedy for Love, the bestselling Life Among Giants, and the Flannery O’Connor Award–winning collection Big Bend. His memoir in nature, Temple Stream, won the Maine Literary Award in nonfiction. Roorbach has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He held the William H. P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. His craft book, Writing Life Stories, has been in print for twenty-five years. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Ploughshares, Granta, Ecotone, New York Magazine, and other publications. He lives in Maine with his family.
Betsy Sholl’s tenth collection of poetry, As If a Song Could Save You, will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in the fall of 2022. Her ninth collection of poetry is House of Sparrows, New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Otherwise Unseeable won the 2015 Maine Literary Award for poetry. In 2020, MWPA awarded Sholl the Distinguished Achievement Award, and just this spring USM awarded her an honorary doctorate. She also served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011. Other awards include the AWP Prize for Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and two Maine Individual Artists Grants. She currently teaches in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Portland.
Myronn Hardy is the author of five books of poems: Approaching the Center, winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award; The Headless Saints, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Catastrophic Bliss, winner of the Griot-Stadler Prize for poetry, Kingdom, and most recently, Radioactive Starlings, published by Princeton University Press. His poems have appeared in journals such as The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He teaches poetry at Bates College.