BRUCE COHEN

KATE RUSHIN

Bruce Cohen’s poems and non-fiction essays have appeared in well over a hundred literary periodicals such as AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner & The Southern Review as well as being featured on Poetry Daily & Verse Daily—He has published three acclaimed volumes of poetry: Disloyal Yo-Yo (Dream Horse Press), which was awarded the 2007 Orphic Poetry Prize, Swerve (Black Lawrence Press) and Placebo Junkies Conspiring with the Half-Asleep (Black Lawrence Press). A recipient of an individual artist grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, prior to joining the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Connecticut in 2012, he directed, developed, and implemented nationally recognized academic enhancement programs for the last thirty years at the University of Arizona, The University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Connecticut.

Kate Rushin is an Oberlin alum with an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University and has received fellowships from The Cave Canem Foundation and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has taught poetry writing workshops and African-American literature at MIT and Wesleyan University. She is the award-winning author of The Black Back-Ups, poems based on her experiences growing up in Lawnside, New Jersey, a small, working-class African-American town that arose from the Underground Railroad. "My Lord, What A Morning," a series of poems inspired by The Marian Anderson Studio at the Danbury Historical Society, was written on commission from the International Festival of Arts and Ideas/Connecticut Freedom Trail Poetry Project. Kate serves on The Connecticut Poetry Circuit and The James Merrill House Committee.

This reading is sponsored by the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens,
and is part of the Rose Festival weekend at Elizabeth Park.