Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

Join acclaimed poets Allison Adair and Tiana Clark who will read from prize-winning debut collections and talk about their inspiration, influences, and some essential elements of craft in developing the poems in these books.

Allison Adair’s debut collection, The Clearing, selected by Henri Cole for Milkweed’s Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, was named a New York Times "New and Noteworthy" book. From the midst of the Civil War to our current era, Adair charts fairy tales that are painfully familiar, never forgetting that violence is often accompanied by tenderness. Described by Cole as “haunting and dirt caked,” her unromantic poems of girlhood, nature, and family linger with an uncommon, unsettling resonance. Adair’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Waxwing, and ZYZZYVA; and have been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in the Mid-American Review Fineline Competition. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Adair lives in Boston, where she teaches at Boston College and Grub Street.

Tiana Clark’s (author photo credit: Crystal K Marteldebut) full-length poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) is winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  Clark is also the author of Equilibrium (Bull City Press), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, a Pushcart Prize, the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She was the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Clark has received fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University’s M.F.A. program where she served as the poetry editor of the Nashville Review. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Washington Post, VQR, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Clark teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Sponsored by The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts