Reading by Marie Ponsot, Catherine Barnett, Alison Powell March 30, 2009

Marie Ponsot is a poet, essayist, translator, and teacher. Her many books of poems, include The Bird Catcher, winner of the National Book Critic Circle, Springing: New and Selected Poems, The New York Times notable book of the year. Her latest book, Easy, is forthcoming in October 2009. She has translated over 37 books from French to English, including Love & Folly: Selected Fables and Tales of La Fontaine. She has co-authored with Rosemary Deen two books about the fundamentals of writing, Beat Not the Poor Desk and Common Sense. Among her awards are the National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, The Robert Frost Poetry Award, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. She is emerita of Queens College, CUNY, and this spring 2009 teaches at the New School and the 92 Street YMHA.

Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart. Her book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published in 2004 by Alice James Books. Barnett teaches at Barnard, the New School, and NYU. She also works as an independent editor and recently collaborated with the composer Richard Einhorn on the libretto for "The Origin," his multimedia oratorio about the life of Charles Darwin.

Alison Powell's poetry has appeared in journals including Black Warrior Review, AGNI, Puerto del Sol, Caketrain, Quarterly West, RHINO, Denver Quarterly, Cream City Review, New Orleans Review, and the anthology Best New Poets (2006); her work is forthcoming in Guernica and Spoon River. A recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Writers at Work, she was the Agha Shahid Ali Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in 2006. Her first book of poems (currently titled On the Desire to Levitate) has been a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize, Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, and semi-finalist for the Walt Whitman Award (National Poetry Series). She is pursuing her PhD in Literature at CUNY, focusing on the Renaissance and Metaphysical poets. Originally from Indiana, she now lives in the Lower East Side and teaches at Fordham University.