Monday Poets: Cindy Savett, Jonathan Blunk, and Celia Bland
Virtual
Join us for the virtual Monday Poets Reading Series, hosted by poet Warren Longmire. There will be a short Q & A with poet May Cindy Savett, Jonathan Blunk, and Celia Bland after their readings. Register for this free event at mondaypoets.eventbrite.com.
Cindy Savett is the author of Child in the Road (Parlor Press), The Breath (BlazeVOX ) and the chapbooks: The Story of my Eyes, Battle for the Metal Kiss, Rachel: In the Temporary Mist of Prayer, and Overtures of Survival. Her work is also found in the anthology, Challenges for the Delusional. Cindy is published widely in both print and online journals. Educated at The Baldwin School, Gratz College, and The University of Pennsylvania, she studied the impact of sociological and religious thought on existential dialogues within the individual, working with Van Harvey, Laurence Silberstein and Victor M. Lidz. The sudden death of her youngest daughter generated a fierce reckoning in her poems. As a result, for the past two decades Cindy’s poetry has focused on the experience of grief from various perspectives, including that of her deceased child. Her work has evolved into an investigation into the nature of the “I” when it encounters the “Other”. Cindy continues to lead poetry workshops for psychiatric inpatients at several area hospitals.
Jonathan Blunk is a poet, essayist, and radio producer. His authorized biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), earned praise from The New York Times as “fine-grained literary biography at its finest,” and was also a Times Editors’ Choice. Blunk assisted with editing Wright’s selected letters (A Wild Perfection, FSG 2005) and has published widely about Wright’s poetry. His recent essays and reviews have appeared in The Georgia Review, and poems in FIELD magazine and other journals. Blunk is at work on a sequence of poems inspired by the life and paintings of Juan Gris.
Celia Bland is co-editor with Martha Collins of Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (U of Michigan, 2019) and the author of YA biographies of the Native American leaders Pontiac, Osceola, and Peter MacDonald, and of The Conspiracy of the Secret Nine, a young adult novel about the Wilmington, NC race riots of 1898. Madonna Comix, an image and poetry collaboration with artist Dianne Kornberg, was exhibited at NYC’s Lesley Heller Gallery and published with an introduction by Lucy Sante. Her work has been included in anthologies published by Faber & Faber; Station Hill Press; Finishing Line Press; Persea Books; CavanKerry Press; and Tupelo Press. The title poem from Celia Bland’s third collection of poetry, Cherokee Road Kill, received the Raynes Prize, judged by L.S. Asekoff.
Literature Department
Pepper Hall (Room 207)
215-686-5402
Parkway Central Library
1901 Vine Street (between 19th and 20th Streets on the Parkway)
Philadelphia, PA 19103
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