Nathalie Anderson & Lisa Sewell have been friends in poetry for over twenty-five years, sharing manuscripts, and working together to coordinate events at Swarthmore (where Anderson directed the program in Creative Writing before her recent retirement) and at Villanova (where Sewell serves now, in English, Creative Writing, and Gender and Women’s Studies).  In 2021, they collaborated more formally with artist Susan Hagen on the book of drawings and poems, Birds of North America. 

This year, both poets are launching new collections of poetry – Anderson’s Rough, out from The Word Works, and Sewell’s Flood Plain, published by Grid Books. 

Please join us in celebrating these poets and their new work on Thursday January 23rd at 6:00pm in the Skyline Room on the 4th floor at Parkway Central Library.  This is FREE event and no need to register.

Nathalie Anderson’s books of poetry include Following Fred Astaire, Crawlers, Quiver, Stain, Rough, and the chapbooks My Hand My Only Map and Held and Firmly Bound. She collaborated in 2021 with artist Susan Hagen and poet Lisa Sewell on Birds of North America. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, DoubleTake, Natural Bridge, The New Yorker, Nimrod, Plume, and elsewhere. Her poem “Rant” was recently featured on Major Jackson’s The Slowdown, and Rough received an extended review on Norman Finkelstein’s poetry blog, Starry Messengers. Anderson has authored libretti for five operas, in collaboration with Philadelphia composer Thomas Whitman. She manages the list-serv Lit-Philly that informs about 500 members about literary events in the Philadelphia area. A former Pew Fellow, she has recently retired from Swarthmore College, where she taught as Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Literature, and served as Director of the Program in Creative Writing.

 Lisa Sewell is the author of The Way Out, Long Corridor, Name Withheld,  Impossible Object – winner of the Tenth Gate Prize from The Word Works press – and Birds of North America, a collaboration with artist Susan Hagen and poet Nathalie Anderson. Her fifth book, Flood Plain, will be published by Grid Books in 2025.  She has co-edited several collections of essays for Wesleyan University Press including American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics with Claudia Rankine and American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language with Kazim Ali. She has received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, and has held residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the MacDowell Colony, The Tyrone Guthrie Center, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and elsewhere. Recent work has appeared on Major Jackson’s The Slowdown and on the Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day” website, and in numerous journals including Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Posit, Laurel Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches in the English Department at Villanova University.