"Deft, magical, filled with light as he makes light and thus lightens the load, Violi's poetry is pure pleasure," says American Book Review, and Paul Violi's listeners find themselves smiling much of the time, even when the subject matter is dark. His work is witty, highly skilled, continually surprising— irresistible.
Mr. Violi, who lives in Putnam Valley, NY, and teaches at New York University and Columbia, has published ten books of poetry, most recently Breakers from Coffee House Press. Hanging Loose Press has published three of his poetry books—Fracas, Likewise, and The Curious Builder—as well as a collection of short prose titled Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes.
His poems can be found in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize 25th Anniversary Edition, Best American Poetry 2000, and many other anthologies.
He is the recipient of the 2001 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also received two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships and grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, The Fund for Poetry, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Honor Moore's most recent collection of poems, Darling, was published by Grove Atlantic in September 2001. Her biography of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent, The White Blackbird, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1996, and Memoir, a previous collection of poems appeared in 1989. Mourning Pictures, a play in poetry about her mother's death from cancer, was produced on Broadway in 1974 and published in The New Women's Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which she edited. Subsequently it was produced in London, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, and most recently in Spearfish, South Dakota.
Moore has received awards in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and in play writing from the New York State Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Seneca Review, Conjunctions and in many other magazines, journals and anthologies.
In 1997 she was Visiting Distinguished Writer in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Iowa; she has lectured in nonfiction at Bennington Writer's Workshops MFA program, and was in 2000 the visiting poet at Wesleyan University. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA writing program at New School University and will be visiting faculty in the graduate writing program at Columbia this spring. In October, she moved back to New York City after living for 17 years in northwestern Connecticut.
Suggested Donation: $5 ($3 for members)
The readings at the HVWC are made possible in part by grants from the Bydale Foundation and the Gannett 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.