In February 2015, Philip Levine—one of the great voices in American poetry—died at 87. While his poems championed the working class of his native Detroit, he understood poetry to be a global art form. Author of more than twenty collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Simple Truth (1994), Levine taught at California State University, Fresno for over three decades and served as the 18th U.S. Poet Laureate. This event honors his life and artistry.

Poet and workshop leader Joanna Furhman hosts a reading and publication party for From the Mouth of Babes, work by participants in her 6-week summer poetry workshop, held at Greenwich House Senior Center, Independence Plaza.

The first reading of Actualities, the collaborative book from poet Norma Cole and artist Marina Adams. Adams echoes the spareness of Cole’s language with delicate lines that contour muscular negative spaces, sometimes stark and densely foreboding, sometimes luxuriant with color. Norma Cole dialogues with Marina Adams with syncopated poems concerned with fragmentation, transformation, love, precarity, and the tenuousness of kinship between places, things, and being.

This event is made possible in part through the Poets House Literary Partners Program

A reading celebrating the 50th issue of Plume: a Journal of Contemporary Poetry and the annual Plume Anthology of Poetry, with poets Sarah Arvio, Sally Bliumus-Dunn, Cindy Cruz, Elaine Equi, Jerome Sala, and Grace Schulman.

This event is made possible in part through the Poets House Literary Partners Program.

Hear six voices representing the most recent developments in literary traditions that can trace an unbroken history of Indigenous storytelling back more than 70,000 years. In a special partnership, First Nations Australia Writers’ Network [hyperlink http://www.fnawn.com.au/] brings writers, poets and storytellers to Poets House as part of an international tour. Cathy Craigie, First Nations Australia Writers’ Network Founder and Executive Director, will introduce Dr.