Global Poetry Festival 2022

Moderated by Tom Sleigh in the BWL Performing Arts Center.

"Jim Seeley (trumpet/flugelhorn, composer/arranger) studied at Berklee College of Music. He has toured, recorded and/or performed with Ray Charles, Chucho Valdes, The Duke Ellington Orchestra, Louis Bellson, Michel Camilo, Maynard Ferguson, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, The Machito Orchestra, Greg Allman and Friends, and has been a long-standing member and featured soloist with The Chico O’Farrill Afro Cuban Big Band. Jim is a member of Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra (2009 and 2015 Grammy winner-best Latin Jazz), and is a frequent collaborator with Arturo O’Farrill in various small groups and ensembles, including a sextet that recently released its debut CD, entitled “Risa Negra.” (Source) (left)

"Robert Pinsky is a poet, essayist, translator, teacher, and speaker. His first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism—and such national enthusiasm in response—that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world." (Source) (center)

"Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry, including his most recent book, The King’s Touch, from Graywolf Press in February 2022....He is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn. During the last decade, he has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, and Libya." (Source) (right)

Honors Poetry students present their multimodal projects.

"Robert Pinsky is a poet, essayist, translator, teacher, and speaker. His first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism—and such national enthusiasm in response—that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world." (Source)

"Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of seventeen poetry books and the memoir How I Discovered Poetry. She is also the author of The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems, which won the 1998 Poets’ Prize, Carver: A Life In Poems, which won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and Fortune’s Bones, which was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. She is also the author of the biography Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor’s Life (2022). Nelson’s honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Frost Medal. She was the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006." (Source)

"James B. Nicola’s poems have appeared in the Antioch, Southwest and Atlanta Reviews, Rattle, and Poetry East. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice award. His two poetry collections, published by Word Poetry, are Manhattan Plaza (2014) and Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016). He won a Dana Literary Award, a People's Choice award (from Storyteller) and a Willow Review award; was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and once for a Rhysling Award; and was featured poet at New Formalist. A Yale graduate as well as a composer, lyricist, and playwright, James has been giving both theater and poetry workshops at libraries, literary festivals, schools, and community centers all over the country. His children’s musical Chimes: A Christmas Vaudeville premiered in Fairbanks, Alaska, where Santa Claus was rumored to be in attendance on opening night." (Source)

Honors Poetry students present their multimodal projects.

Honors Poetry students present their multimodal projects.

Alexandra Newton Rios, bilingual, bi-hemispherical poet, translator and teacher lives in the small city of San Miguel de Tucumán, one of the poorest regions of northwestern Argentina and Manhattan near the Hudson River Park. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa with an MFA in English from the Writers' Workshop and an MFA in Translation in Comparative Literature. She received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a graduate of The Chapin School in New York City. She taught at The Kew Forest School, Saint Peters University, Pepperdine University, Redlands University, and for the Spanish Department of the University of Iowa. In San Miguel de Tucumán she taught at Colegio Los Cerros and Escuela Normal Juan Bautista Alberdi. For the Fundación Vicente Lucci she taught indigent sugarcane workers how to read and write in a workshop she created called A los cuatro vientos/ To the Four Winds where autobiographies were written and shared with families of the adult students.

Alexandra Newton Rios translated the poetry of Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral into English as her MFA thesis Gabriela Mistral: Voice of Fire and Cradle. She published her Mistral translations in Exchanges and Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art in the New World. She translated into English the poetry of Argentine Olga Orozco and Pablo Neruda. Her translations of seventeen long poems of Argentine Néstor Groppa formed part of Seven Poets of the Northwest: Portrait of a Land for the University of Iowa’s Comparative Literature Department as a doctoral candidate. She translated the lives of sixty women from 1000 Peacewomen Across the Globe for the Swiss Foundation 1000 Peacewomen For the Nobel Peace Prize 2005. She translated twenty three poems by Marvin Bell into Spanish for a translation collaboration called Deluge/Diluvio to be published in Argentina. She participated in 2004, 2009 and 2010 as a bilingual writer in the Buenos Aires international Book Fair invited by the American Embassy. Alexandra Newton Rios translates all of her work. Cielo. Cielo. Cielo., The Grace Poems/Poemas de la gracia and Amaicha: Language Lost and Found are three bilingual editions she translated for publication by Ediciones Magna in Argentina. She turned to nonfiction to write about life in a third world country with The Light of Argentina: a Philosophy Diary Conversations with Hannah Arendt. (Bio: Website)

"ArtsAhimsa is a network of artists and friends working together to promote non-violence through the Arts. ArtsAhimsa is a grassroots, global performance Arts movement that makes the connection between the affirmative power of the Arts and our common desire for a peaceful world and clean environment." (Source)