Poet and translator David Ferry, author of Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse, shares his translation of this great epic of ancient Mesopotamia. Ferry discusses the poetic and narrative intensity of this classic work, considered to be the oldest written story on earth.

Famous for electrifying performances of his work, Kiwao Nomura is revered in Japan, where he has been awarded major literary honors. This reading and conversation, celebrates the publication of his first book of poems in English, Spectacle and Pigsty.

Poets House will be open for reading and reflection. Poems of remembrance and reconciliation will be posted for all to read.

Poets House and Trinity Wall Street, in conjunction with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, present a reading by some of America's leading poets as part of the 10th anniversary commemoration of 9/11. Poets Marie Howe, Major Jackson, Lawrence Joseph, Cornelius Eady, J. Chester Johnson, Martha Rhodes and others will read poems of grief, remembrance and reconciliation.

Poet and preeminent translator of the mystic poet Rumi, Coleman Barks reads from his translations of the poet and discusses the power of 13th - to 14th - century mystical Sufi poetry.

Red Hen Press presents a day of readings by:

Joseph O. Legaspi meets Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

Joseph O. Legaspi received a 2001 poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Born in the Philippines, he holds degrees from Loyola Marymount University and the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Recent poems have appeared and are forthcoming in the Seneca Review, Bamboo Ridge, Crab Orchard Review, Puerto Del Sol, Gulf Coast, The Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Tilting the Continent, an anthology of Southeast Asian literature.

Thomas Lux meets Jon Sands

Acclaimed poet and teacher Thomas Lux is a veteran of Page Meets Stage and the author of over a dozen books of poetry. He began publishing haunted, ironic poems that owed much to the Neo-surrealist movement in the 1970s. Critically lauded from his first book Memory’s Handgrenade (1972), Lux’s poetry has gradually evolved towards a more direct treatment of immediately available, though no less strange, human experience.

Please join us for an exceptional exhibit of images culled from the Oresman collection. Rodney Phillips curates a selection of over thirty works of art, from Magritte to Brainard, Diebenkorn to Warhol, representing wildly different styles and mediums but collectively focused around the theme of people reading.

This exhibition unveils treasures from the archive of Alberto de Lacerda (1928–2007), one of Portugal's most admired poets, who spent the majority of his adult life in England and the United States. On display are the fruits of his friendships with world-renowned writers and artists: letters to de Lacerda, inscribed books, handwritten poems and other gifts from the likes of John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Marianne Moore, Octavio Paz and Anne Sexton, among many others.

•5:00pm Opening Reception