Virtual Poetry Reading: Gregory Djanikian and Daniel Simpson

Tuesday October 26, 2021 – 7pm  

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=RjJUdCtJVXRySjlvMHdXakJRRzVmUT09

Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 – Passcode: 678146

Gregory Djanikian is the author of seven collections of poetry, The Man in the Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, So I Will Till the Ground, Dear Gravity, and most recently, Sojourners of the In-Between (February, 2020), all appearing from Carnegie Mellon University Press. His poems have appeared in such places as The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, crazyhorse, The Florida Review, The Iowa Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), Becoming Americas: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America), Poem in Your Pocket (The Academy of American Poets), Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton), 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House), among others. He was for many years Director of the Creative Writing Program at Penn until his retirement in 2015. He lives outside of Philadelphia.

In 2017, Daniel Simpson 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 Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times, 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 he wrote, received its premiere performance by Voces8 in London last December. 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.

Alina Macneal & Jennifer Hook, Hosts – Open Reading Follows