Hudson Valley Writers Center presents An Evening of Prose with Paisley Rekdal & Carol Edgarian

The Hudson Valley Writers Center presents An Evening of Prose with Paisley Rekdal & Carol Edgarian on August 18 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. EDT via Zoom.

From the organizers:

This reading will take place via Zoom. The Zoom link will be emailed at the time of registration and again on the day of the reading. (Please check spam / promotions folder for this email and email admin@writerscenter.org with any questions.)

Donations toward the readers’ honoraria are greatly appreciated.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee;  the hybrid photo-text memoir, Intimate; and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pants; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Washington State Book Award. Her newest work of nonfiction is Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines cultural appropriation (W.W. Norton, 2021). Her book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam. was published by University of Georgia Press in 2017. A new collection of poems, Nightingale, which re-writes many of the myths in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, was published spring 2019.  She was the guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020.

Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative’s Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019), and on National Public Radio, among others. She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she is also the creator and editor of the community web projects Mapping Literary Utah and Mapping Salt Lake City. In May 2017, she was named Utah’s Poet Laureate and received a 2019 Academy of American Poets’ Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Carol Edgarian is an award-winning novelist, essayist, teacher, and editor. Her novels include the newly-released Vera, the New York Times bestseller Three Stages of Amazement, and the international bestseller Rise the Euphrates, hailed by The Washington Post as a book “whose generosity of spirit, intelligence, humanity and ambition are what literature ought to be and rarely is today.” Rise the Euphrates was awarded the ANC Freedom Prize, and a twentieth-anniversary revised edition of the novel was released to mark the centennial of the Armenian Genocide. 

Carol’s articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and W, among many other places, and she coedited The Writer’s life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame from the Diaries of the World’s Great Writers. She is a frequent speaker at conferences and schools on topics such as “Why Stories Matter,” “The Art of Fiction” and publishing today.

In 2003 Carol and her husband, Tom Jenks, founded the nonprofit Narrative, a leading digital publisher of fiction, poetry, essays, and art. Dedicated to encouraging reading without paywalls, and to supporting writers by paying them fairly for their work, Narrative publishes hundreds of artists each year and is widely read across generations, in schools, and around the globe. Its entire digital library of thousands of works of literature by celebrated authors and by the best emerging writers is available for free. Six years ago, Carol launched Narrative in the Schools, programs that augment Narrative’s library of literature with free video tutorials, lesson plans, a writing contest for high schoolers, and other essential tools for teachers and students in underserved communities around the world. She is a proud mentor to some amazing young writers. Born in New Britain, Connecticut, to first-generation American parents, Carol is a graduate of Phillips Andover and Stanford University.

Register here: https://www.writerscenter.org/calendar/rekdaledgarian/