Poetry at Bennington: Philip Metres and Valzhyna Mort
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Poets Philip Metres and Valzhyna Mort read from their recent poetry collections "Shrapnel Maps" and "Music for the Dead and Resurrected," followed by a public Q&A.
Philip Metres has published multiple books, including the poetry volumes Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020), Sand Opera (Alice James, 2015), and To See the Earth (Cleveland State, 2008); the critical studies The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan, 2018) and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa, 2007); and translations of Russian poets Arseny Tarkovsky, Lev Rubinstein, and Sergey Gandlevsky. His work has garnered a Lannan Foundation fellowship, two NEA fellowships, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator from Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections: Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG 2020), a book of letters for the dead, named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2020 by The New York Times; Collected Body (Copper Canyon, 2011), and Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon, 2008). Her work has been honored with a Lannan Foundation fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, and Granta. Translating between English, Belarussian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, Mort has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and an NEA fellowship for Polina Barskova’s Air Raid (Ugly Duckling 2021). She is also coeditor of Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. (Tupelo, 2014). She is an assistant professor of literature and translation at Cornell University.
This is a co-sponsored event with Bennington Translates.