Gregory Pardlo & Tina Cane
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo and recent Poet Laureate of Rhode Island Tina Cane will join forces once again at the Providence Athenæum – this time to celebrate the release of Pardlo’s new collection, Spectral Evidence (Penguin/Random House, 2024). Elegant, profound, and intoxicating, Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, has been hailed as “complex, linguistically rich, and unsparing in its analysis of both the current national psyche as well as the poet’s own,” (Library Journal).
Tina Cane will read new work, as well as poems from her most recent collection, Year of the Murder Hornet, (Veliz Books, 2022), which Donald Revell called “a book of virtues and humane understanding…both urgent and durable” which establishes “a rule of heart and of vivid allegiances…not only valid but redemptive.” The readings will be followed by a conversation between the poets.
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Gregory Pardlo is the author of the poetry collections Spectral Evidence and Digest, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem, winner of the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize, and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden, and a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Tina Cane is the Founder/Director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI, and served as her state’s poet laureate from 2016-2023. She is the author of The Fifth Thought; Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz; Once More With Feeling; Body of Work; and Year of the Murder Hornet – all from Veliz Books. In 2016, Cane received the Poetry Merit Fellowship Award from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and was a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/ curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread. Cane’s debut novel-in-verse for young adults, Alma Presses Play, (Penguin/Random House) was released in September 2021. Tina is also editor of Poetry is Bread: The Anthology (Nirala Press, 2024). Are You Nobody, Too? – Cane’s newest novel-in-verse for young readers – is forthcoming in 2024.
This season was generously supported by the following friends and partners:
