Seminary Co-op
N/A
Chicago, IL 60637
United States
VIRTUAL EVENT
Stella Hayes will read from her debut poetry collection, One Strange Country, joined by Grady Chambers reading from his book North American Stadiums. They will be joined in conversation by David Erbenbach. This event will be presented on Crowdcast; register here!
Presented in partnership with What Books Press.
About One Strange Country: In her debut poetry collection, Russian-American poet Stella Hayes, replaces one strange country with another she calls home, mapping an origin story of identity, exile and loss. In stark and sharp language, Hayes conveys poems of witness, longing and love. With lyrical urgency, Hayes interrogates displacement and belonging, what it means to grow attached to places as much as to people. This collection takes a reader from a child’s understanding of family life in the former U.S.S.R., to an understanding of what it means to come of age, marry, and give birth to children in an adopted country. “An exile’s life is planned one day at a time,” Hayes declares in one poem which informs her own experiences, as a daughter, sister, mother, and poet. “One Strange Country is as much a collection of maps as it is a collection of poems.” (Erica Wright) Hayes has embraced what Frank Bidart would call her “radical givens,” those writerly obsessions that we cannot escape.
About Stella Hayes: One Strange Country is Stella Hayes’s first poetry collection. She grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. Hayes earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and has appeared in Prelude, The Recluse, The Lake and Spillway, among others. She lives with her family in Larchmont, N.Y.
About Grady Chambers: Grady Chambers is the author of North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions) chosen by Henri Cole as the winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Recent poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Sun, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and lives in Philadelphia.
About David Erbenbach: David Ebenbach writes. He has been writing ever since he was a kid, when he kept his whole family awake by banging away on an enormous manual typewriter, and he’s never wanted to stop. He is the author of seven books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and his work has picked up awards along the way: the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Patricia Bibby Award, and more. A Philadelphia native, these days David does most of his writing in Washington, DC, where he lives with his family―because he uses a laptop now, he doesn’t keep them awake with his typing―and where he works at Georgetown University, teaching creative writing and literature. His latest book is called Some Unimaginable Animal.
Grady Chambers
Grady Chambers was born and raised in Chicago. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, attended the MFA program at Syracuse University, and has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center and the New York State Summer Writers Institute.
The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.