Red, White, and Blue: Poets on Politics

Featuring Sandra Cisneros, Tony Hoagland, & Benjamin Alire Sáenz

We need a huge turn out to inspire Sandra to come live in Houston.

We not only won't ban her books like Arizona did, but we'll celebrate her work.

 A collaboration of the Poetry Society of America & Inprint

 in association with Nuestra Palabra and the Librotraficante Movement

 Be the first to experience Sandra's new book HAVE YOU SEEN MARIE?

Monday, October 1, 2012, 7:30 pm – free admission

Lyndall Finley Wortham Theatre

University of Houston, Entrance 16

Red, White, and Blue: Poets on Politics is a national series presented by the Poetry Society of America and its regional partners featuring poets in conversation about politics in their work as well as in that of their poetry predecessors. The series runs in tandem with the election year, with main events in Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC. The Houston edition, presented in collaboration with Inprint and in association with Nuestra Palabra, will feature Sandra Cisneros, Tony Hoagland, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz, each presenting examples of political poetry and then engaging in a panel discussion with moderator Alice Quinn, Executive Director of Poetry Society of America. A book sale and signing will follow.

Featured Poets

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros has written extensively about the Latina experience in the United States. She is best known for The House on Mango Street, published in 1984, which tells the story of a young Latina woman coming of age in Chicago; the book has sold more than two million copies. She has published several collections of poetry, including My Wicked, Wicked Ways and Loose Woman. Her other books include Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, which creates an impressionistic portrait of life on the U. S./Mexico border; the novel Caramelo, a multigenerational family saga; and a bilingual children’s book, Hairs/Pelitos. Her new book, Have You Seen Marie, a tale of grief and loss, will be published this fall. Cisneros has received numerous awards for her work, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1995 and the Texas Medal of the Arts Award in 2003. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Tony Hoagland

Tony Hoagland writes with wit and insight about the dilemmas of modern life. His latest collection of poems, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, was published in 2010. His previous collections include What Narcissism Means to Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in poetry; Donkey Gospel, which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin, which was chosen for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and won the Zacharis Award from Emerson College. His other honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the O.B. Hardison Award for excellence in teaching, and the Mark Twain Award for humor. He has also published a book of essays on poetry and craft, Real Sofistakashun, and two chapbooks of poems, Hard Rain and Little Oceans. Hoagland teaches in the University of Houston Creative Writing Program and in the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Benjamin Alire Sáenz served as a Catholic priest in the early 1980s in El Paso, Texas, and then he returned to school and earned an MA in creative writing. He received a Wallace E. Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, where under the guidance of Denise Levertov he completed his first book of poems Calendar of Dust, which won an American Book Award in 1992. His other collections include Elegies in Blue and Dreaming the End of War, and in 2010 he published his fifth collection The Book of What Remains, which explores the contrast between the desert's beauty and the brutality of border politics. He has also published four novels, including Carry Me Like Water, four young adult novels, and four children’s books. Sáenz teaches in the bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Moderator

Alice Quinn

Alice Quinn is Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's graduate School of the Arts. She was poetry editor at The New Yorker from 1987 to 2007 and at Alfred A. Knopf, Publishers, from 1976 to 1986, and she is the editor of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop. Her articles on and interviews with writers, poets, and artists have appeared in Artforum, Canadian National Post, The Forward, Poetry Ireland, The New Yorker, and The New Yorker Online, and she is currently at work editing the journals and notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop.

Special thanks to the University of Houston School of Theatre and Dance and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at UH for hosting this event.