TERRANCE
HAYES’ debut collection of poems, Muscular Music, won
the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Whiting Emerging Writers Award, and
his second collection, Hip Logic, was a National Poetry Series
selection. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies of emerging writers,
including American Poetry: The Next Generation and Giant Steps:
The New Generation of African American Writers, and in journals such
as Fence, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Department at Carnegie Mellon University
and is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA low residency program. The
Los Angeles Times said of Hip Logic, “His range…is that of
a bold virtuoso and a fearless chronicler of character: Big Bird, Paul
Robeson and Balthus all sound off in these revelatory poems.”
LAURA
KASISCHKE's highly praised novels, Suspicious River
(1996) and White Bird in a Blizzard (1999), were followed this
year by the startling and haunting work, The Life Before Her Eyes,
which takes a Columbine-like moment and plays it out into the future through
the character, Diana, who has asked to be spared while her best friend
is killed. Mary Gaitskill comments: “Like a modernist Shirley Jackson,
Laura Kasischke artfully evokes the terror and mystery at the core of
ordinary life—unlike Jackson, she is doubly artful at evoking its beauty.”
Ms. Kasischke is also a very fine poet. Her first collection won the Bobst
Award for Emerging Writers, the second won the Alice Fay DiCastagnola
Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the third won the Beatrice
Hawley Award. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan.
Suggested Donation: $5 ($3 for members)
The readings at the HVWC are made possible in part by a grant from the Bydale 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 Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government, corporations and individuals.