Performance Series

Summer Performance Series 2008
Please see below for information about picnicking, parking fees and weather-related announcements.

Download a 2008 Flyer (PDF) to print and take with you!

OPENING NIGHT
June 11, Wednesday, 6:30 pm
Robert Pinsky
Author of numerous volumes of poetry (including The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966—1996, a Pulitzer Prize nominee), books about poetry (including Poetry and The World, nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award), and translations of poetry (including the Los Angeles Times book award winner The Inferno of Dante), Robert Pinsky has earned praise for his dynamism, imagination and range. He served as United States Poet Laureate from 1997—2000, appointed by the Library of Congress in 1999 to an unprecedented third term. In 1999 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recipient of the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture's 2006 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award in Literary Arts, Pinsky teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, writes the weekly "Poet's Choice" column for the Washington Post, and serves as the poetry editor for the online magazine Slate.
www.barclayagency.com/pinsky.html

Joining Pinsky will be Merge, "celebrating the marriage of poetry and music" (David Amram, 2006). Merge is a collaboration between the poetry of Cassandra Cleghorn and the music of Erik Lawrence (saxophone & flute), Allison Miller (drums), and Rene Hart (acoustic bass).
www.mergepoetrymusic.com

June 25, Wednesday, 6:30 pm

Connecticut Poetry Circuit Winners
Five winners of a Connecticut Poetry Circuit-sponsored, state-wide poetry contest among Connecticut college students will captivate the audience with their work. Poets include: Tess Bird, a Women's Studies major with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Connecticut; Lisa Butler, a Visual Fine Arts major at Manchester Community College; Chiara Di Lello, a student at Wesleyan University; Taylor Katz, an English major with a concentration in Poetry and a Religious Studies minor at Connecticut College; and Tyler Theofilos, a senior English major in the Writing Concentration at Yale University.

Coleman Barks
A renowned poet and bestselling author of The Essential Rumi, The Soul of Rumi, Rumi: The Book of Love, Rumi: Bridge to the Soul et al., Coleman Barks was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in Persian language and literature by the University of Tehran for his thirty years of translating Rumi (Sufi mystic, 1207—1273). Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Mr. Barks taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty years. He has been a student of Sufism since 1977.

Mr. Barks will read the poetry of Rumi with musical accompaniment by Grammy Award winning cellist and composer Eugene Friesen. Barks and Friesen "weave a magic carpet of poetry, stories and humor."

www.colemanbarks.com
www.eugenefriesenmusic.com

July 9, Wednesday, 6:30 pm
Billy Collins
United States Poet Laureate 2001—2003 and New York State Poet Laureat 2004—2006, Billy Collins combines critical acclaim with popular appeal. Recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and of awards such as the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize, Collins has published eight collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Picnic, Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes, Nine Horses, and The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems. Upon reading at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in 1999, Collins proclaimed the festival "a cultural phenomenon."

Joining Billy Collins will be award-winning jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan — "one of the jazz world's best kept secrets" (Blue Note) — with Cameron Brown on bass.

www.barclayagency.com/collins.html
www.sheilajordanjazz.com

July 23, Wednesday, 6:30 pm
Patricia Fargnoli & Ilya Kaminsky

Patricia Fargnoli, the New Hampshire Poet Laureate, is the author of 3 books and 2 chapbooks of poetry. Her first book, Necessary Light (Utah State University Press, 1999) won the May Swenson Book Award, and her latest book, Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press, 2005), is the winner of the prestigious 2005 Jane Kenyon Poetry Book Award for Outstanding Poetry published by a New Hampshire author in the preceding two years. Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares and The Mid-American Review, and have been published internationally in Turkey, China and Canada. In addition to her career as a poet, Ms. Fargnoli is a retired social worker/psychotherapist and a past member of the National Association of Poetry Therapists.

Award-winning author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), Russian poet Ilya Kaminsky offers a "rare and exhilarating pleasure" (Boston Review). Winner in 2005 alone of the Whiting Prize, the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and the Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award, he is widely regarded as the most exciting young poet in America today. In the late 1990s, Mr. Kaminsky co-founded Poets for Peace, an organization which sponsors poetry readings in the United States and abroad with a goal of supporting relief organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and Survivors International. In addition to teaching Contemporary World Poetry and Literary Translation in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at San Diego State University, Mr. Kaminsky is the 2007-2008 Writer-in-Residence at Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

New York-based vocalist, composer and lyricist Tessa Souter offers jazz with a Middle Eastern and flamenco flavor. "A talented ... broadly imaginative singer" (New York Times).

www.joefargnoli.com
www.ilyakaminsky.com
www.tessasouter.com

August 6, Wednesday, 6:30 pm
Paul Muldoon
Pulitzer Prize winner and author of 10 collections of poetry, Irish poet Paul Muldoon was recently appointed poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine. In addition to his "stimulating, provocative and unfailingly interesting" poetry (Maria Johnson, Contemporary Poetry Review), Muldoon has won awards for songs co-written with Warren Zevon and Bruce Springsteen.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature in 1996. Other awards inlcude the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, inter al.

Musical guest Rackett, founded by Muldoon and Nigel Smith in 2004, is a "strong, self-contained, furiously rocking band" (Stuart Mitchner, Princeton Town Topics), with "enlightened lyrics" and "nasty guitar licks."

www.paulmuldoon.net
www.rackett.org

August 20, Wednesday, 6:30 pm
NIGHT OF FRESH VOICES
Connecticut high school artists from diverse cultural backgrounds present award-winning verse. Participants to be announced. Guitarist Freddie Bryant presents a "gorgeous blend of delicate harmonics, etherial harmonies and rhythmic freedom" with "an incendiary groove" (Jim Fergeson, Jazz Times Magazine).
www.freddiebryant.com

Please email poetry@hillstead.org with questions.

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