EventsThe New Social Environment#95

A Tribute to John Ashbery

Tuesday, July 28, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

In celebration of his birthday, the Rail is hosting a reading of John Ashbery by poets Tonya M. Foster, Todd Colby, Emily Skillings, Olivier Brossard, Anselm Berrigan, and Kyle Dacuyan. The event will be led by Marcella Durand.

In this Talk

Tonya M. Foster

Tonya M. Foster's latest collection Thingifications: A Mathematics of Chaos is overdue to her publisher Ugly Duckling Presse. Her first book A Swarm of Bees in High Court was published by Belladonna*. She is an editor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art; and of the forthcoming Umbra Galaxy (Wesleyan University Press). She is a recipient of support from Creative Capital Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, and Headlands Center for the Arts, and received the 2023 C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Tonya is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University where she serves as the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry, and is a co-director of the 70+ year old Poetry Center.

https://tonyafosterpoet.com/

Todd Colby

Brooklyn-based poet and artist Todd Colby is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent book, Splash State, was published by The Song Cave in 2014. His writing and art have recently appeared in The Believer, Bomb Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Dizzy Magazine, Hyperallergic, and Poetry Magazine.

Emily Skillings

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut," and the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands, Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins in Spring 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017, and has taught creative writing at Yale University, Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, Poets House, the 92nd Street Y, and through Brooklyn Poets. She lives in Brooklyn.

Olivier Brossard

A member of the Institut Universitaire de France, Olivier Brossard is an Associate Professor of American literature at Université Gustave Eiffel where he runs the Poets and Critics program with Vincent Broqua and Abigail Lang: www.poetscritics.org. In 2000, he co-founded the Double Change collective, an online magazine and reading series in Paris www.doublechange.org. Olivier Brossard is joca seria éditions American poetry series editor: his most recent translation is John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, in collaboration with Pierre Alferi and Marc Chénetier (joca seria, 2020). He has also translated Marcella Durand, Tonya Foster, Kevin Killian, Frank O’Hara, and Ron Padgett, amongst others.

Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan is the poetry editor for the Brooklyn Rail, and author of a number of books of poems, most recently Pregrets, from Black Square Editions.

Marcella Durand

Marcella Durand’s most recent books include The Prospect, just now out from Delete Press, https://deletepress.org, and Earth’s Horizons, her translation of Michèle Métail’s book-length poem, Les Horizons du sol, published this spring by Black Square Editions, https://www.blacksquareeditions.org. Other publications include Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017); Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.), with French translations by Olivier Brossard (joca seria, 2016); Deep Eco Pré, a collaboration with Tina Darragh, (Little Red Leaves); AREA (Belladonna); and Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem), written during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is currently working on a new collection forthcoming from Black Square Editions.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨