Friday, September 27th @ 7PM
Poets House
10 River Terrace
New Yawk, NY
FREE
Our own Ryan Black is celebrating his first book of poetry, The Tenant of Fire, with a book launch that is going to be lit! Head to Poets House this Friday evening to celebrate this milestone in Ryan’s career.
Congrats, Ryan!
https://www.facebook.com/events/628618127667215/
Description:
In poems on the homecoming of Vietnam vets, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and the firebombing of Malcolm X’s East Elmhurst house, Ryan Black’s The Tenant of Fire explores how and why the plurality of a place like Queens—where nearly 200 languages are spoken—is viewed as a threat to national security.
Please join the University of Pittsburgh Press in celebrating the publication of The Tenant of Fire, winner of the 2018 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize.
Light refreshments will follow a reading by Ciaran Berry, Sameer Pandya, Esther Lin, and Ryan Black.
CIARAN BERRY’s most recent book is Liner Notes, published by The Gallery Press in 2018. He is also the author of The Dead Zoo, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and The Sphere of Birds, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Originally from the West of Ireland, he lives in West Hartford and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Trinity College.
SAMEER PANDYA is the author of the story collection The Blind Writer, which was longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. He is also the recipient of the PEN/Civitella Fellowship. His fiction, commentary, and cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including the Atlantic, Salon, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and Narrative Magazine. He teaches creative writing and South Asian and Asian American literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His first novel Members Only is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
ESTHER LIN was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is a 2020 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. She has received honors from the Crab Orchard Review and Poets House. A ’17–’19 Wallace Stegner Fellow, she currently organizes for the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers they face in the literary community.
RYAN BLACK is the author of The Tenant of Fire, winner of the 2018 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Death of a Nativist, selected by Linda Gregerson for the Poetry Society of America’s 2016 Chapbook Fellowship. He’s received fellowships and scholarships from the Adirondack Center for Writing, The Millay Colony for the Arts, PLAYA, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Queens Council on the Arts, and the T. S. Eliot House. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, and lives in Jackson Heights.
This event is made possible through Poets House’s Literary Partners program. Poets House is an ADA accessible facility.
Admission is free and open to the public.
