Join more than a dozen poets and artists to celebrate the life and work of the beloved poet Robert Creeley (1926-2005).

Join poets Gloria Gervitz, one of the most important Mexican poets of the post-Paz generation, and Mónica de le Torre, co-editor of a landmark collection of contemporary Mexican poetry, in a conversation about long poems, translation, Latin American history, feminism, and personal memory.

What are Langston's lessons? An examination of the work of Langston Hughes will help you learn more about America. It will help you explore the tough tapestry of race. His work will make you look into the mirror and see yourself. Are you ready? Who was this man who taught us how to dream? The life and work of Langston Hughes echoes the social transformation of America from the 1920s to the early 1960s. How did he put blues and jazz into his words? What was his secret? Come dance with the dreamer and discover how he changed literature.

What are Langston's lessons? An examination of the work of Langston Hughes will help you learn more about America. It will help you explore the tough tapestry of race. His work will make you look into the mirror and see yourself. Are you ready? Who was this man who taught us how to dream? The life and work of Langston Hughes echoes the social transformation of America from the 1920s to the early 1960s. How did he put blues and jazz into his words? What was his secret? Come dance with the dreamer and discover how he changed literature.

Since she began publishing her tight lyrics of Chicago’s great South Side in the 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks has been one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century. Her poems distill the very best aspects of Modernist style with the sounds and shapes of various African-American forms and idioms. Brooks is a consummate portraitist who found worlds in the community she wrote out of, and her innovations as a sonneteer remain an inspiration to more than one generation of poets who have come after her.

Three poets respond to and comment on the artwork in the Dahesh Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition, The Legacy of Homer: Four Centuries of Art from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, which will be on view October 11–January 22. In addition to their commentary, hear them read and discuss Homer’s as well as their own poetry.

Beginning in February 2005, Staten Island teens and adults will be doing what Poetry in The Branches was designed for: bumping into poetry and discovering its delights. The pilot year of this program will see Staten Island branches of The New York Public Library hosting six poetry-writing workshops for teens, and, for adults, a series of readings by stellar poets of their own and their favorite poets’ work. On a Spring afternoon or evening, when a trip on the ferry adds an extra note of pleasure to your day, come hear these readings.

Beginning in February 2005, Staten Island teens and adults will be doing what Poetry in The Branches was designed for: bumping into poetry and discovering its delights. The pilot year of this program will see Staten Island branches of The New York Public Library hosting six poetry-writing workshops for teens, and, for adults, a series of readings by stellar poets of their own and their favorite poets’ work. On a Spring afternoon or evening, when a trip on the ferry adds an extra note of pleasure to your day, come hear these readings.

In his talk on Federico García Lorca's life and work, Edward Hirsch will explore Lorca's artistic sources, including native Andalusian music and the metaphorical style characteristic of the avant-garde Hispanic literary movement Ultraísmo, the intellectual community in which Lorca became a youthful prodigy, his complicated friendships with Salvador Dali and Luis Buñel, his place in Spanish literary history, his emotional and intellectual crises, and how he came to write what Hirsch considers to be one of the greatest books of poems ever written about New York City,

Author and illustrator Elizabeth Bushey will present special animations of her poems and stories about everything we love (dinosaurs!) and hate (vegetables!). She’ll also lead us in a poetry writing workshop—something we definitely love!