Author Hour: Poetry Month with Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Valzhyna Mort, and Srikanth Reddy

Join us on Facebook Live for a new segment of Author Hour (on the 3rd Saturday each month!) Today's special program is celebrating National Poetry Month with some amazing poets! We are joined today Rachel Eliza Griffiths (SEEING THE BODY), Valzhyna Mort (MUSIC FOR THE DEAD AND RESURRECTED) and Srikanth Reddy (UNDERWORLD LIT).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multi-media artist, poet, and novelist. She received the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of numerous fellowships. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals. Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books 2010) and The Requited Distance (The Sheep Meadow Press 2011). Griffiths’ third collection of poetry, Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose 2011), was selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her most recent full-length poetry collection is Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books 2015), which was a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry. Griffiths’ recent collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body, was published by W. W. Norton in June 2020. Her forthcoming debut novel, Promise, will be published by Random House.

Valzhyna Mort

Born in Minsk, Belarus (part of the former Soviet Union), in 1981, Valzhyna Mort has been praised as “[a] risen star of the international poetry world” by the Irish Times. When she moved to the United States in 2005, she had already published her first book, I’m as Thin as Your Eyelashes, and was known across the world as an electrifying reader of her poems. Her debut collection in America, Factory of Tears (2008), received acclaim. She composes her poems in Belarusian as attempts are being made to revitalize the traditional language, which lends her work both conventional and groundbreaking tones. Mort is the author of the poetry collection Collected Body (2011) and co-editor of Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (2014). Her newest book of poetry is MUSIC FOR THE DEAD AND RESURRECTED. Mort teaches at Cornell University and lives in Ithaca, New York.

Srikanth Reddy

Srikanth Reddy's latest book of poetry is Underworld Lit. His previous book, Voyager, was named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and National Public Radio; his first collection, Facts for Visitors, received the 2005 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. Reddy's poetry and criticism have appeared in Harper's, The Guardian, The New York Times, Poetry, and numerous other venues; his book of criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. A recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, he is currently Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.