Poetic News: Reading and Workshop Scheduled for Sunday

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Saratoga Springs’ new poet laureate Jay Rogoff will have a busy weekend after announcing two free poetry-related events both scheduled to take place on Sunday, Feb. 1.

At Skidmore College’s Tang Museum, three nationally-known poets will read their work at 3 p.m.: Chase Twichell, April Bernard, and Peg Boyers. The award-winning authors all live in the Spa City. The reading, which will occur in the museum’s Payne Room, is free and open to the public.

Twichell has published eight collections of poetry, with her ninth due later this year from Copper Canyon Press. Her 2010 book of new and selected poems, “Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been,” won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. She has also received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Artists Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. Her most recent book is “Things as It Is.”

Bernard won the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award for her debut book, “Blackbird Bye Bye.” Since then, she has published five poetry collections with W. W. Norton, most recently “The World Behind the World.” She has also published two novels and frequently contributes criticism to The New York Review of Books, Book Post, and elsewhere. Also a former Guggenheim Fellow, Bernard teaches at Skidmore College and is currently assembling a volume of new and selected poems.

Boyers’ four books include “Hard Bread,” “Honey and Tobacco,” “To Forget Venice,” and “The Album,” whose poems appear beside reproductions of the paintings that inspired them. She teaches poetry writing and translation at Skidmore, as well as at Columbia University and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is also the longtime executive editor of Salmagundi magazine.

“It’s rare to have three poets of such talent and variety at a single event,” Rogoff said. “This should be a must for anyone curious about how poetry moves us.”

The reading will include a question-and-answer session, followed by a book signing by the poets and a reception.

Earlier on Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Rogoff will meet with writers at his second Poetry Repair Café at the Northshire Bookstore. Poets can drop by to discuss how to bring their poems closer to what they wish them to accomplish.

Rogoff will be conducting his Poetry Repair Café the first Sunday of every month, except for Easter.