Stuart Dybek and Yusef Komunyakaa
Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - 6:30pm
SAIC Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Avenue
In partnership with the Poetry Foundation.
Distinguished authors Stuart Dybek and Yusef Komunyakaa read their work along with emerging artists Rachel Webster and the winners of the Poetry Center’s Hands on Stanzas Student Inaugural Poem Contest.
Stuart Dybek is the author of three books of fiction: I Sailed With Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Both I Sailed With Magellan and The Coast of Chicago were New York Times Notable Books, and The Coast of Chicago was a One Book One Chicago selection. Dybek has also published two collections of poetry: Streets in Their Own Ink and Brass Knuckles. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Poetry, Tin House, and many other magazines, and have been widely anthologized, including work in both Best American Fiction and Best American Poetry. Among Dybek’s numerous awards are a PEN/Malamud Prize “for distinguished achievement in the short story,” a Lannan Award, a Whiting Writers Award, an Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, several O.Henry Prizes, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award.
Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of several books of poetry, including Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Magic City (1992). He has also written dramatic works, including Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (Wesleyan University Press, 2006), and Slip Knot, a libretto in collaboration with Composer T. J. Anderson and commissioned by Northwestern University. His honors include the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. And he is currently Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University’s graduate creative writing program.
Rachel Webster is a poet, educator and activist. In 1997, she won both the Academy of American Poets’ Young Poets Prize and the Association of University Women Award, the latter for her implementation of a poetry workshop with homeless and gang-involved teens in Portland, Oregon. From there, Rachel moved to Chicago’s Gallery 37, working closely with chair Maggie Daley to extend arts apprenticeships to city teenagers. In 2001, she helped create Words 37, which now offers literary arts programs, after-school and in the summers, to thousands of Chicago teens. Rachel collected and edited these young writers’ poems and stories in two anthologies, Alchemy (2001) and Paper Atrium (2004). Rachel’s own poems and articles have been published in many journals, and she is currently finishing two manuscripts of poetry for book-length publication. Rachel teaches at Loyola University, Chicago, and Northwestern University. She is continually inspired by her students, and grateful to her teachers—from her hometown of Madison, Ohio, from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, from Warren Wilson College, in Asheville, North Carolina, and from all communities of poets and lovers of poetry, living and passed.
