An evening of poetry featuring award-winning author, translator, and teacher Katie Farris, accompanied by Philadelphia authors Olga Livshin and Sarah Browning.
Author of A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, boysgirls, and Thirteen Intimacies, Katie Farris is on tour with her new Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six, during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. With humor and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn’t hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life—even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on.
Olga Livshin, author of A Life Replaced: Poems and Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman, is a writer who helps others tell their stories. Raised in Odesa, Ukraine and Moscow, Russia, she has taught creative writing for many years; her own poems, translations, and essays have been published in The New York Times, AGNI Online, the Kenyon Review Online, and other journals. At this event she will be reading from the new book Today is a Different War, a collection of poems by Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska featuring Livshin’s translations, as well as from her own poetry written over the course of the past year in response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Poet, essayist, and activist Sarah Browning is the author of two collections of poems, Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Beloit Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, and many other journals and anthologies. She is co-founder and was Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation & Witness for 10 years, and is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. “At a time when poets and writers are frequently and earnestly asking the age-old question of What can I do to help, to make change in this current social and political climate?, we can look to Sarah Browning as an example. Browning is a poet whose work (writing and activism) puts question into action. Her work supports, exposes, builds, tears down, and gathers.” — Holly Mason, So to Speak Journal