Tickets to "Summer Readings" - 09 Jul 2009
With Elaine Feinstein, Phillis Levin and Jo Shapcott.
Enjoy a summer's evening at the Poetry Society in the company of three leading poets from the UK and America
Elaine Feinstein is a poet, novelist and biographer. Born in 1930 in Liverpool to parents of Jewish-Ukrainian descent, she grew up in Leicester and read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1980 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1990 she received a Cholmondeley Award. She has also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leicester and three Arts Council Translation awards. Elaine has written for radio and television and is a regular reviewer for The Times and Poetry Review. She lives in London. Elaine Feinstein has published over thirty books, including fourteen novels and a biography of Ted Hughes. Carcanet publish her Selected Poems, her collections Gold and Daylight, her Collected Poems and Translations (a 2002 Poetry Book Society Special Commendation) and After Pushkin, her anthology of contemporary responses to the poetry of Alexander Pushkin. Elaine Feinstein has recently published a biography of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, Anna of All the Russias (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Her new volume is a translated volume of Marina Tsvetaeva: Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems.
Phillis Levin was born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College and The John Hopkins University. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, Temples and Fields, The Afterimage, Mercury, and May Day, and is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Her many honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in New York City and teaches at Hofstra University and in the graduate creative writing program at New York University.
Jo Shapcott was born in London in 1953. She was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin. She teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London and is also Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Newcastle and the University of the Arts, London. She is Consulting Editor for Arc Publications. Her book, Poems 1988-1998 (2000), consists of a selection of poetry from her three earlier collections: Electroplating the Baby (1988), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Phrase Book (1992), and My Life Asleep (1998), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection). She has also won the National Poetry Competition twice. Together with Matthew Sweeney she edited an anthology of contemporary international poetry in English, entitled Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (1996).
Her book Tender Taxes, a collection of versions of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems in French, was published in 2002. The Transformers (2007), is a collection of public lectures given by Jo Shapcott as part of her Professorship at Newcastle, and she is co-editor (with Linda Anderson) of a collection of essays about Elizabeth Bishop. Her latest book is a translation, with Narguess Farzad, of Poems by Farzaneh Khojandi (2008).
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