The Welsh Connection
Robert
Minhinnick lives in south Wales, where he is a consultant to
the environmental body, Sustainable Wales, and edits the international
quarterly, Poetry Wales. He has published 7 volumes of poetry,
the last being Selected Poems and After the Hurricane. A
book of translations from the Welsh, The Adulterer's Tongue, appears
this fall. He also writes essays, and Watching the Fire Eater was
Welsh book of the Year in 1993. His many other awards include the UK's
Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem in '99. Minhinnick has performed
his poetry throughout the UK and in Argentina, Canada, and in several
European countries.He is currently working with Dylan Thomas' publisher,
New Directions, on an event that profiles the 50th anniversary of Thomas'
death.
Pascale
Petit now lives in London, where she is poetry editor of Poetry
London, but she was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales.
Her happiest memories are of living with her half Welsh/Irish, half Indian
grandmother in mid-Wales. Her first poetry collection was Heart of
a Deer. Her second, The Zoo Father, is about her difficult
relationship with her dying father, whom she is seeing for the first time
in 35 years. Rich in the imagery of the Amazonian jungle (fire ants, shaman
masks, hummingbirds, shrunken heads, jaguars), the poems both ward off
and redeem him through myriad transformations. It was a Poetry Book Society
Recommendation and won an Arts Council of England Writers' Award and a
New London Writers' Award. Les Murray calls her "among the five or six
of the very best current poets of the UK."
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The readings at the HVWC are made possible in part by a grant from the Bydale Foundation; the Taft 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 Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government, corporations and individuals.