Finding Home
Richard
Blanco says he’s “made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to
the United States” because his pregnant mother and the rest of the family
emigrated from Cuba to Madrid where he was born, and then only 45 days
later, emigrated once more and settled in Miami where he was raised and
educated.
He explored these roots in his acclaimed first book, City of a Hundred Fires, which received the prestigious Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press (1998). His second book, Directions to The Beach of the Dead (University of Arizona Press, 2005) won the 2006 PEN / American Beyond Margins Award and is winning further enthusiastic praise.
Of this second book, poet Elizabeth Alexander comments: “While these poems possess a keen sense of past and place, they move beyond nostalgia to the rich difficulties of the nowhere but here that is his clear milieu,” and poet Virgil Suarez calls his voice “unmistakably brilliant and original.”
Blanco’s poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies and he has received Bread Loaf and Florida Artist Fellowships and has taught at Georgetown, American University and Connecticut State University. He now lives in Miami.
Terese
Svoboda lives in NYC but grew up the eldest of nine children in Nebraska.
Eight colleges “contributed to her exit,” she says, and she worked her
way through as a magician’s assistant, a disc jockey, a rock reviewer,
and a bank clerk. She traveled to the Cook Islands and lived in Sudan
before finally getting an MFA from Columbia.
Tin God (2006), her fourth novel, revolves around a desperate 16th-century conquistador who is lost in the tall prairie grass, a modern-day dope-dealing male go-go dancer, and God—in the person of a perm-giving, sheetcake-baking Latina farm woman. Writer A. M. Homes called the book “haunting and profound,” Vanity Fair warned that it “detonates on contact,” and writer Dan Chaon calls Svoboda “a true American original (who) writes with an angelic beauty and a devilish sense of humor.”
Svoboda has a total of eight books and her work has appeared in Harper’s, Paris Review, Tin House, Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other publications. Her many honors include an O. Henry, a nonfiction Pushcart, two NY Foundation for the Arts grants in poetry and fiction, and the Iowa Prize in poetry. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Williams, the College of William and Mary, and elsewhere.
All readings include a question & answer period and a reception with books by the author(s) for sale.
Suggested
Donation: $5 ($3 for HVWC members and those under age 18)
Programs and events at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center are made possible, in part, by grants from the Bydale Foundation, the David G. Taft Foundation, the Orchard Foundation, and the Thendara Foundation; with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and by the Basic Program Support Grant of the Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government.