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Ecopoetry Reading
March 25 @ 3:00 pm
Ecopoetry Reading
Desirée Alvarez, Alonso Llerena, Stephen Massimilla, Thea Matthews, Jo Sarzotti, and Elizabeth Zuba
Saturday, March 25, 2023, 3pm
at BWAC
481 Van Brunt Street, Door 7
Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY 11231
Poets read poems relating to the sea and its creatures, the New York waterfront, and environmental issues. All are New York based poets: Desirée Alvarez, Alonso Llerena, Stephen Massimilla, Thea Matthews, Jo Sarzotti, and Elizabeth Zuba.
This presentation is held in conjunction with On the Waterfront: A View from the Coast (Line), a CENTRAL BOOKING exhibition in collaboration with the New-York Historical Society, featuring installations by fourteen artists. On view from March 3-April 23, Saturdays and Sundays, 12-6pm and by appointment.
The 44-page catalog for On the Waterfront: A View from the Coast (Line), including a Preface by Margi Hofer, Museum Director of the New-York Historical Society, is available for viewing and purchase online and at the New-York Historical Society Museum Shop.
Desirée Alvarez is a painter and poet. Her second book, Raft of Flame, 2020, received the Lake Merritt Poetry Prize from Omnidawn. Her work has received grants and awards from New York Foundation for the Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Foundation for Contemporary Art. She teaches at CUNY and The Juilliard School.
Alonso Llerena is a Peruvian writer, visual artist, and educator. His current work explores the interconnection between the poetics of exile and the poetics of the remains. His words cling to concrete materiality of trace, ruins whether physical or ingrained in memory. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Offing, FENCE, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. He has earned an MFA from Bard: Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
Stephen Massimilla’s books include Frank Dark (Barrow Street, 2022); the coedited Stronger Than Fear anthology; Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo, 2016, Eric Hoffer Award, etc.); The Plague Doctor (SFASU Press Prize); Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera Prize, CUNY); The Grolier Prize, etc. His poems appear in hundreds of publications. He holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches there and at The New School.
Thea Matthews is a poet and educator of African and Indigenous Mexican descent originally from the land of the Ohlone, San Francisco, California. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University, and her poetry has appeared in On the Seawall, West Trade Review, Southern Indiana Review, and other journals. Currently, Thea lives on the land of the Lenape, Brooklyn.
Jo Sarzotti has two books of poetry, Mother Desert (Graywolf 2012), winner of the Bakeless Prize selected by Carl Phillips, and Waiting for Achilles (Black Lawrence Press 2019). She has also published poems in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Southwest Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Radar, Alaska Quarterly, Borderlands, Verse Daily, and the anthologies, Poem a Day: 365 Poems and Vade Mecum (Red Hen Press). She lives in New York City.
Elizabeth Zuba is a translator, poet and art writer. Her most recent book Frog Pond Splash: Collages by Ray Johnson with Texts by William S. Wilson (Siglio Press) was listed as a New York Times Best Art Book of 2020.
