An Evening with Alicia Ostriker, Joan Larkin & Dzvinia Orlowsky (via Zoom)

Join Jennifer Franklin & Sophia Bannister as they launch the 2025 reading series with new poetry by Alicia Ostriker, Joan Larkin, & Dzvinia Orlowsky. Each of the poets will read for 20 minutes from their new books and there will be a Q&A with audience questions.

Alicia Ostriker has published 19 collections of poetry, been twice nominated for the National Book Award, and has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, among other honors.   Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Atlantic, Prairie Schooner,  and other journals, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic.  Her most recent collections of poems are Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019.  She was New York State Poet Laureate for 2018-2021 and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2015-2020. She lives with her husband in New York City.

Joan Larkin is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Blue Hanuman (2014); My Body: New and Selected Poems (2007), which received the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle; Lambda Literary Award winner Cold River (1997); and Housework (1975). With Jaime Manrique, Larkin translated Sor Juana’s Love Poems, a bilingual edition of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetry (1997). Her prose works include If You Want What We Have: Sponsorship Meditations (1998) and Glad Day: Daily Meditations for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender People (1998). Her plays include The AIDS Passion, The Living, and Wiretap. Larkin co-founded Out & Out Books during the 1970s feminist literary explosion and has co-edited four anthologies, including Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time. A lifelong teacher, she has served on the faculties of Brooklyn College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Smith College, among others. Larkin has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She received the 2011 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Award-winning, Pushcart Prize poet, translator, a founding editor of Four Way Books, Dzvinia Orlowsky  is the author of six poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, most recently Those Absences Now Closest, 2024. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a Sheila Motton Book Award, a co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was a winner of the 2019 New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize selected by Robert Pinsky. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s selected poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize in Poetry, ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry, and the 2022 winner of the AAUS Translation Prize. A full-length collection of her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Halyna Kruk’s poetry is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2024. Dzvinia is a contributing poetry editor to AGNI and Solstice Literary Magazine. She is Writer-in-Residence at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program, Lasell University.