On October 21, join The Common for a conversation about poetics in the time of pandemic and the ecology of lockdown. Acclaimed poets Dana Levin and Tess Taylor will read new work and discuss the importance of place, hope, and resilience in their creative and personal lives in a conversation moderated by Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker. This event is a fundraiser to celebrate The Common’s 10th publishing year and launch the place-based magazine into its second decade. Join us for stirring poetry and thoughtful talk!
Hosted by Left Bank Books in St. Louis. October 21, 7 pm CENTRAL TIME. (5 pm PST. 8 pm EDT.)
The event is free, with a suggested donation of $10. All donations up to $500 will be matched by a donor.
Tess Taylor is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry. The San Francisco Chronicle hailed Taylor’s first book, The Forage House, as “stunning.” Critic Stephanie Burt called Work & Days, her second book, “our moment’s Georgic” and it was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by The New York Times. Taylor’s poetry and nonfiction appear widely. She has served as the Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland and the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. Taylor has also been the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Taylor has taught widely, and is currently on the faculty of Ashland University’s Low-Res MFA Creative Writing Program. In spring 2020 she published two books of poems: Last West, part of Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures at the MoMA, and Rift Zone, called “brilliant” in the LA Times, from Red Hen Press. She grew up and lives in El Cerrito, California.
Dana Levin’s fourth book is Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), a finalist for the Rilke Prize. Previous books include In the Surgical Theatre, Wedding Day, and Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as from the Lannan, Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin currently serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis, where she lives.
Jennifer Acker is founder and Editor in Chief of The Common, and author of the debut novel The Limits of the World, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her memoir “Fatigue” is a #1 Amazon bestseller, and her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, Guernica, The Yale Review, Off Assignment, and Ploughshares, among other places. Acker teaches writing and editing at Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest.
