Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice, edited by C. Alexander & S. Massimilla, Anthology Reading with Kim Addonizio, Ellen Bass, Toi Derricotte, & Jane Hirshfield (via Zoom)

Join editors Carol Alexander and Stephen Massimilla as they welcome award-winning poets Kim Addonizio, Ellen Bass, Toi Derricotte, & Jane Hirshfield from the new anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice on Zoom. In this timely and timeless collection, remarkable poets—both emerging and established—bring myriad traditions, styles, and vital perspectives to pressing questions, such as how poetry can help us to overcome obstacles to empowerment, compassion, social change, and educational opportunity. Drawing from the work of teachers, artists, and activists, Stronger Than Fear moves us into sudden and startling awareness. These poems arrive at their truths with insight and generosity, with courage and spirit.

This reading is free and open to the public but donations towards the poets’ honoraria are welcome and appreciated.

HVWC attendees will receive a discount on the award-winning anthology ($10.95, as opposed to the full price of $24.95) when ordered directly from Cave Moon Press via their email: [email protected] All proceeds go to the Malala Fund which “works for a world where every girl can learn and lead.”

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. Tickets are free but donations towards the poet’s honoraria are welcome as are book purchases.

Kim Addonizio is the author of seven poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/music CDS: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel, the companion to My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, a collaboration with woodcut artist Charles D. Jones. Her poetry has been translated into several languages including Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Hungarian. Collections have been published in China, Spain, Mexico, Lebanon, and the UK. Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. Her latest books are a poetry chapbook (a collaboration with Brittany Perham), The Night Could Go in Either Direction (Slapering Hol Press), Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton), and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin). A new book of poems, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, was published by W.W. Norton (March 2021).

Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear  frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and The California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Toi Derricotte is the author of “I”: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award, The Undertaker’s Daughter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), Natural Birth (Firebrand Books, 2000), Tender (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Captivity (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). She is also the author of The Black Notebooks (W.W. Norton, 1999), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction. Her chapbook, A Bruise Figure of Remembrance. a collaboration with Dawn Lundy Martin was published by Slapering Hol Press. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. She is also the founder, along with poet Cornelius Eady, of Cave Canem, the preeminent organization devoted to the development and support of Black poetry in the United States. Cave Canem’s work has changed the landscape of American poetry, and produced Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning poets, in addition to winners of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, the NAACP Image Award, the Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the National Poetry Series, and Ruth Lilly and Lannan fellowships. A beloved and respected mentor to a generation of Black poets, she has  been awarded the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for service to the literary community, and the Elizabeth Kray Award for service to the field of poetry from Poets House. She is professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Born and raised in Detroit, she currently lives in Pittsburgh.

Jane Hirshfield, in poems described by The Washington Post as belonging “among the modern masters” and by The New York Times as “passionate and radiant,” addresses the urgent immediacies of our time. Ranging from the political, ecological, and scientific to the metaphysical, personal, and passionate, Hirshfield praises the radiance of particularity and reckons the consequence of the daily. Her nine poetry books include  Ledger (March, 2020), The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, short-listed for England’s T.S. Eliot Award and named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times. Her two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), have become classics in their field, as have her four books collecting and co-translating the work of world poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Japanese Court; Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women; Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems; and The Heart of Haiku, on Matsuo Basho, named an Amazon Best Book of 2011. Her next book will be The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, September 2023). Hirshfield’s other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The Poetry Center Book Award,  The California Book Award, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. In 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, in conjunction with reading to an estimated 50,000 people on the Washington Mall at the first March For Science, she co-founded Poets For Science, housed with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2022 Hirshfield was appointed Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow at Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland.

Carol Alexander earned her PhD in American Literature from Columbia University and works as a writer and editor specializing in educational publishing. Alexander is the author of the poetry collections Fever and Bone (Dos Madres Press, 2021), Environments (Dos Madres Press, 2018) and Habitat Lost (Cave Moon Press, 2017.)  Her poems appear in anthologies and journals such as The American Journal of Poetry,  Canary, The Common, Caesura, Cumberland River Review, Denver Quarterly,  Hamilton Stone Review, Matter, Mobius, One, Pangyrus, Pif, Ruminate, The Seattle Review of Books, Southern Humanities Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Sweet Tree Review, Terrain.org and Third Wednesday and in English, Irish, Australian, and Canadian journals and anthologies.  She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been read on NPR and featured in readings throughout New York City. In addition to poetry, Alexander has authored children’s fiction and nonfiction.

Stephen Massimilla is a poet, scholar, professor, painter, and author whose newest poetry collections are Frank Dark (Barrow Street Press, 2022) and the anthology Stronger Than Fear (Cave Moon, 2022), coedited with Carol Alexander. His multi-genre, coauthored Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo Press, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Award and many others. His earlier books and awards include The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (SFASU Press Poetry Prize); Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera Poetry Prize, CUNY); The Grolier Poetry Prize; the Van Rensselaer Prize, selected by Kenneth Koch; a scholarly study of myth in poetry; numerous Pushcart Prize nominations; award-winning translations; and many others. His work has been featured recently in such publications as AGNI, The American Literary Review, Barrow Street, the Chicago Tribune, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, HuffPost, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and hundreds of others. Massimilla holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia University and The New School. Websites: www.stephenmassimilla.com and www.cookingwiththemuse.com