Slapering Hol Press Presents the 17th annual War & Peace Reading with Dzvinia Orlowsky, Mark Pawlak & Carolyne Lee Wright (Via Zoom)

Please join the SHP co-editors and the SHP Advisory Committee on Zoom as they welcome poets Dzvinia Orlowsky, Mark Pawlak, and Carolyne Lee Wright as they read work central to the theme of War & Peace for our 14th Annual War & Peace Reading.

NB: This reading will take place on Zoom. The link will be sent to the email that you use to register as soon as you reserve a spot. (Please check your spam folder and save the link to your calendar.) It will also be sent to you the day of the reading for your convenience. For questions email [email protected] for more information.

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart prize poet, an award-winning translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She’s published six poetry collections including A Handful of Bees, reprinted for the Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary Series; Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones, winner of a Sheila Motton Book Award; Silvertone, for which she was named Ohio Poetry Day Association’s Co-Poet of the Year, and Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. In 2014 Dialogos published her and Jeff Friedman’s co-translations of Memorials by Polish poet Mieczyslaw Jastrun for which in 2016 they were awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was selected by Robert Pinsky as a 2019 winner of the New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize and in 2021 She and co-translator Ali Kinsella received the New England Poetry Club’s Diana Der Hovanessian Prize selected by Jean Dany Joachim for their translation of Natalka Bilotserkivets’ poem “Allergy”. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from Ukrainian, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow: Selected Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets, was published by Lost Horse Press in Fall, 2021 and shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin International Prize in Poetry.

Much more than the story of Mark Pawlak’s apprenticeship to a major poet (Denise Levertov), My Deniversity (Mad Hat Press, 2021) is a brilliant and delightful introduction to what it means to commit one’s self to Poetry, capital P. Guided by Levertov, aspiring physicist Mark Pawlak turned himself into an important American poet and co-editor of Hanging Loose, one of the country’s longest lived and most influential literary presses. Reconnaissance is Pawlak’s ninth and most recent collection of poetry. He has also edited six anthologies and has been a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press since 1980. Pawlak has a degree in physics from M.I.T. and is Director of Academic Support Programs at UMass-Boston.

Carolyne Lee Wright’s latest books are Masquerade, a memoir in poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021) and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009. A Seattle native who has lived and taught all over the country, and on Fulbright and other fellowships in Chile, Brazil, India and Bangladesh, she has 16 earlier books and anthologies of poetry, essays, and translation. A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Carolyne has held NEA and 4Culture grants; and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award received in early 2020 and delayed by Covid took her back to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, in June and July 2022, with another two months in 2023.