A Reading And Conversation With Shirley Brewer, Ona Gritz, Zack Rogow, And Daniel Simpson
Join us on the back patio for a lively discussion between poets, authors, and translator—most importantly between friends! Come and hear about their most recent projects and the intersections between the different genres of writing and translating.
This event will take place on 4/6 at 4 p.m. at the Ivy Bookshop. The store is located at 5928 Falls Road. Join us rain or shine!
Shirley J. Brewer is a poet, educator and workshop facilitator. She serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts & Technology in Baltimore. Recent poems garnish journals Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, Gargoyle, Poetry East, Slant,Tar River Poetry, among many other journals and anthologies. Shirley’s poetry books include A Little Breast Music, (Passager Books, 2008) After Words, (Apprentice House Press, 2013), and Bistro in Another Realm, (Main Street Rag, 2017). Her fourth poetry collection, Wild Girls, was published by Apprentice House Press in June, 2023. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Shirley was interviewed in January, 2020 by Maryland poet laureate, Grace Cavalieri, for her long-running series “The Poet and the Poem” at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where her poems are now archived. Shirley’s poems are part of the Lunar Codex program and are currently on the moon!
Her accessories remain earthbound.
Website: shirleyjbrewer.com
Ona Gritz is the author, most recently, of Everywhere I Look, a memoir about sisterhood, grief, true crime and family secrets. Her nonfiction has appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Utne Reader, Brevity, Parents, The Rumpus, and River Teeth. Among her recent honors are two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays and a Best Life Story in Salon. Ona’s poetry collection Geode was a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her poems can be found in Ploughshares, The Bellevue Literary Review, One Art, Catamaran Literary Reader, Stone Gathering, SWWIM, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. In 2020, she won The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 Project. Ona’s 2023 novel for children, August Or Forever, was a Reader’s Choice and Wishing Shelf finalist in middle grade fiction. Her picture book, Tangerines and Tea, My Grandparents and Me, was named Best Alphabet Book of 2005 by Nick Jr. Family Magazine, and a Best Book of the Year by Scholastic Parent & Child Magazine. The Space You Left Behind, her first young adult novel, written in verse, is forthcoming from West 44 Books in June 2024. A columnist for Literary Mama for many years, Ona is currently the blog editor for Wordgathering. She lives with her husband, writer Daniel Simpson, near Philadelphia.
Zack Rogow is the author, editor or translator of more than twenty books or plays. His most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies, was published by Regal House. Rogow’s other books of poetry include Talking with the Radio: poems inspired by jazz and popular music. His play Colette Uncensored (coauthored with Lorri Holt) had its first public reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and has been staged in London, Catalonia, San Francisco, Indonesia, and Portland. His most recent book of translations is Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris, by Isabelle Stibbe. Rogow is the editor of an anthology of poetry of the U.S.A., The Face of Poetry, from University of California Press. His song lyrics include “A Love for Just Part” sung by Carrie Wicks. He has taught in several MFA creative writing programs, and serves as a contributing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader. He has received the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in Translation, the Celestine Award for Poetry from Holy Names University, and the Tanka Splendor Award.
Daniel Simpson is the winner of the inaugural Propel Poetry Prize for his latest poetry collection, Inside the Invisible, published by Nine Mile Books in November, 2022 and nominated for the American Academy of Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. In 2017, he and his wife, Ona Gritz, collaborated on two books, as co-authors of Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems and as co-editors of More Challenges for the Delusional, an anthology of prose, poetry, and writing prompts. School for the Blind, his first collection of poems, came out in 2014. His work has been anthologized in About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, and Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, and has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, and many other journals. “Let’s Walk Together,” a composition for bass soloist and choir, based on a text written by Daniel Simpson, received its premiere performance by Voces8 in London in December 2020. Voces8 and four other choirs also performed “A Song Everyone Can Sing, for which he served as lyricist in March, 2019. The recipient of a Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he tends a blog, Inside the Invisible, which can be found at insidetheinvisible.wordpress.com.
