The following event description is adapted from the Gramercy Books website. The event image was originally published on the Gramercy Books website.
Join award-winning poet and MFA alumna, Maggie Smith, as she launches Goldenrod, her stunning new poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life. Smith will be in conversation with acclaimed poet, educator, editor, and literary critic David Baker in a Zoom Webinar program.
The Ohio State University Creative Writing Program, Ohio Poetry Association, and Kenyon Review are Community Partners with Gramercy Books for this poetry evening.
PLEASE NOTE, EVENT GOERS! This program is a Hybrid Author Event! That means live AND live streamed, so look for a ticket called In-Store Attendance + GOLDENROD, where a limited number of people can register to attend in person. Book signing with both authors will be included! (We ask attendees to arrive by 6:45 pm so everyone is seated and we can begin our live-streaming of this event on time!)
Registration is on Eventbrite. A general admission ticket to access the event is $5; a ticket that includes Goldenrod waives the admission fee and is $25 with tax. Registration closes at 5:00 pm on the day of the event.
With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”
Slate called Smith’s “superpower as a writer” her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.
Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of several books of poetry including Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, The List of Dangers, and Nesting Dolls. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and more.
David Baker is an educator, editor, literary critic, and one of contemporary poetry's most gifted lyric poets. His most recent Swift: New and Selected Poems showcases his continued growth in form and voice. He has been called "the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright." David has authored twelve books of poetry as well as six books of prose. His forthcoming Whale Fall will be out in 2022. Among his awards are prizes and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, Mellon Foundation, and the Society of Midland Authors. He continues to teach literature and poetry at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, where he lives, and is currently editing an ongoing ecopoetics folio, “Nature’s Nature,” at Kenyon Review.
