Featherstone Kicks Off Poetry Season

Be prepared to get word drunk on Thursday at 7 p.m. when poets Dawn Lundy Martin and Ronaldo V. Wilson read at Featherstone Center for the Arts in Oak Bluffs. The event is the kickoff to the summer poetry series at Featherstone which later in the summer will feature champion wordsmiths Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky, Tina Chang and Naomi Shihab Nye.

Ms. Martin is the author of Discipline, which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Poetry Prize; A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, winner of the Cave Cavem Prize; and The Morning Hour, selected in 2003 for the Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship. She is a founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets; coeditor of a collection of essays, The Fire This Time: Young Activists and The New Feminism; and a founder of the Third Wave Foundation in New York, a national young feminist organization. She is also, take a breath, an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Mr. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. He is also the cofounder of the Black Took Collective and currently a visiting assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College.

For more details about the poets or the event, call 508-693-1850 or visit featherstoneart.org.