13th Annual Westchester Poetry Festival with Ilya Kaminsky, Tina Cane, Katie Farris, Farnaz Fatemi, Jennifer Franklin, & Patricia Smith in person at The Masters School

Join us at historic Estherwood at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry as Darren Wood and Miriam Emery, beloved faculty at Masters, introduce keynote, Ilya Kaminsky, as well as Tina Cane, Katie Farris, Farnaz Fatemi, Jennifer Franklin, and Patricia Smith as they celebrate National Poetry Month and their new poetry collections with you.

NB: This is an in-person event will not be live-streamed. Please reserve your tickets now since there are only 100 seats and we expect to sell out. To be added to a waiting list for tickets, please write [email protected] Masks are strongly encouraged but not requited. This event is free and open to the public. Donations towards the poets’ honoraria are welcome at the checkout screen for your ticket registration. We also hope you will consider buying the poets’ books, as the Village Bookstore will be there to sell the newest book from each poet reading and the poets will sign your copy.

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of the widely acclaimed Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry, which Kevin Young, writing in The New Yorker, called a work of “profound imagination.” Poems from Deaf Republic were awarded Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize and the Pushcart Prize. He is also the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), and Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002). Kaminsky has won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and the Foreword Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of the Year award. Recently, he was on the short-list for the Neusdadt International Literature Prize. His poems have been translated into numerous languages and his books have been published in many countries including Turkey, Holland, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain and China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize. His poems have been compared to work by Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva. He is the editor of several anthologies, among them The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Ecco, 2010), co-edited with Susan Harris, which John Ashbery praised as “immediately indispensable;” A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith (Tupelo Press, 2012), co-edited with Katherine Towler;  Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poets and Prose (Tupelo Press, 2014), co-edited with Katie Farris and Valzhyna Mort; and In the Shape of the Human Body I am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide (McSweeney’s, 2017) with Dominic Luxford and Jesse Nathan. With Jean Valentine, he has co-translated Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. In an interview with the Poetry Society of America on poetry and politics, Kaminsky notes, “Poetry is the art of language. It was Brodsky, I think, who said that poetry and politics have only two things in common, letter p and letter o. I agree with this. But, poetry is also the art of attentiveness. Attentiveness, Celan teaches us, is the natural prayer of the human soul. I don’t think there is much poetry of attentiveness that isn’t political. (The decision not to be political is also political.)” Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa. He lost most of his hearing at the age of four after a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a cold, and his family was granted political asylum by the United States in 1993, settling in Rochester, New York. After his father’s death in 1994, Kaminsky began to write poems in English.  In the late 1990s, Kaminsky co-founded Poets For Peace, an organization that sponsors poetry readings in the United States and abroad. He has also worked as a Law Clerk at the National Immigration Law Center and at Bay Area Legal Aid, helping the poor and homeless to overcome their legal difficulties. He currently teaches in Atlanta with his wife, Katie Farris but will be teaching at Princeton in the fall of 2023.

Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at ​the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Middlebury College. She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the Schools, RI, for which she works as a visiting poet. Over the past twenty-five years, Tina has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island.
Her poems and translations have appeared ​in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary  Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Poem-a-Day. Her work,The Fifth Thought, was the 2008 Other Painters Press chapbook winner. Her other books are Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and their three children. In 2020, Cane was named a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread.

Katie Farris is a poet, writer of hybrid forms, and translator. Her poetry has been called “extraordinary” by both Paris Review and The Los Angeles Review of Books, while The Literary Review commented on the “immersive magic and unforgettable imagery” of Farris’s writing. Farris’s work has been commissioned by MoMA and appears in American Poetry Review, Granta, McSweeneys, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Poetry and 2022 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her forthcoming book, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive will be published in April 2023 by Alice James Books. It has been called “luminous” by Carolyn Forche and “real genius” by Kaveh Akbar. Farris is also the author of the chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal, and was called “gorgeous” by Victoria Chang, “enchanting” by Jericho Brown, and “extraordinary” by The Los Angeles Review of Books. Her earlier collection is boysgirls (Tupelo Press), a hybrid-form book, which was lauded as “truly innovative” by Prague Post, “a tour de force” by Robert Coover; and as “a book with gigantic scope” by Louisville Courier-Journal. She also is the award-winning translator of several books of poetry from the French, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Russian, including Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. Her awards include The Pushcart Prize, Orison Prize, and Anne Halley Prize from Massachusetts Review. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University, and currently lives and teaches in Atlanta.

Farnaz Fatemi is an Iranian American poet, editor and writing teacher in Santa Cruz, CA. Her debut book, Sister Tongue زبان خواهر , was published in Sept 2022. It won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Tracy K. Smith, from Kent State University Press and received a Starred Review from Publisher’s Weekly. She is a member and cofounder of The Hive Poetry Collective, which presents a weekly radio show and podcast in Santa Cruz County and hosts readings and poetry-related events. Some of her poems and lyric essays appear in Poets.org (Poem-a-Day), Tab Journal, Pedestal Magazine, Nowruz Journal, Grist Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, Crab Orchard Review, SWWIM Daily, Tahoma Literary Review,Tupelo Quarterly, phren-z.org, and several anthologies (including, most recently, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora, My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices of the Iranian Diaspora and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me). Farnaz has been an artist in residence at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, PLAYA, Willapa Bay AiR, Marble House Project, SWWIM, and I-Park Foundation. She was awarded the Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman Fellowship by Djerassi and has been honored by the International Literary Awards (Center for Women Writers), Poets on the Verge (Litquake SF), Best of the Net Nonfiction, and Pushcart. She is a member of the Community of Writers. Farnaz taught Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1997-2018.

Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023) (which is available now for preorder) No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Franklin is the recipient of a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry and a 2021 Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. Recent work has been published in American Poetry Review, Beloit, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, JAMA, The Nation, The Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Society’s Poetry in Motion, Prairie Schooner, and RHINO. Her poetry has been widely anthologized including in the Bedford Introduction to Literature (Macmillan, 2023). She teaches in Manhattanville’s MFA program and the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City with her husband, her daughter, and her rescue pit bull, Dottie. For more about Franklin’s poetry visit jenniferfranklinpoet.com.

Patricia Smith is the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Feb 2023); Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children’s book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. She is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Patricia is a Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York, a visiting professor in creative writing at Princeton University, and a faculty member in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program.