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Alumnae Poets Gail Mazur, Gina Franco and Eve Grubin
to Read at Smith College
Editor’s note: For a photo of Gail Mazur, Gina Franco or Eve Grubin, contact Marti Hobbes at (413) 585-2190.
NORTHAMPTON, Mass.—Smith College will present an evening of poetry by alumnae Gail Mazur '59, Eve Grubin ‘92 and Gina Franco ‘97 at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13, in Stoddard Auditorium. In celebration of the Poetry Center’s 10th anniversary year, this reading features three alumnae poets at various stages in their careers. The event is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.
Mazur has published five volumes of poetry, including “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. Her most recent volume, “Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems,” won the Massachusetts Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Mazur’s poems celebrate the din and detail of ordinary life with a voice at once whimsical and wholly lucid. A 1959 graduate of Smith, Mazur has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. She is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College and founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, a weekly poetry reading series she ran for 29 years. She and her husband, artist Michael Mazur, live in Cambridge and Provincetown, Mass., where she serves on the writing committee, the board of trustees and the summer program committee of the Fine Arts Work Center. She is an advisory editor to Agni, Ploughshares and The Boston Review.
A 1992 graduate of Smith, Grubin is the author of “Morning Prayer” and has published individual poems in The American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review and Pleiades. In the words of poet Fanny Howe, Grubin seeks “nothing less than a reconciliation between silence and manifestation,” using Jewish mysticism and ritual practice, literary constructs and the formative rites of youth as vehicles for understanding. Grubin earned a master’s degree at Sarah Lawrence College, was a fellow at the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education from 2005-2007 and served as program director at the Poetry Society of America. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in English at CUNY’s Graduate Center and teaches at the New School and City College of New York.
Franco, hailed by poet Demetria Martinez “a masterful new voice,” writes fearless poems that refuse to blink before the reader’s expectant gaze. Her first collection, “The Keepsake Storm,” brims with long-limbed narratives that amble out of a western landscape to reveal harsh truths: alarming family portraits, decay in the natural world, friends and strangers who die too soon. Franco’s work has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review and other journals. A native of Arizona and a 1997 graduate of Smith, Franco lives in Illinois, where she teaches at Knox College.
The reading will be followed by a book sale and signing. For further information, call Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, director, at (413) 585-3368.
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Office of College
Relations
Smith College
Garrison Hall
Northampton, Massachusetts 01063 |
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Marti
Hobbes
News Assistant
T (413) 585-2190
F (413) 585-2174
mhobbes@email.smith.edu
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