The Writer’s Center welcomes Poet Bonnie Naradzay for a reading and discussion of her new collection, Invited to the Feast. Bonnie is in conversation with Poet David Keplinger who will also be reading his own poems.
FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
Bonnie Naradzay’s poems appear in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart Nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review online, Tampa Review, Florida Review online, EPOCH, Pinch (Pushcart Nomination), American Journal of Poetry, One Art (Pushcart Nomination), Potomac Review, Poetry Miscellany, Dappled Things, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Cumberland River Review, and others. Her poetry manuscript, Invited to the Feast, was published October 28, 2025 by Slant Books. Her essay on friendship was published in the anthology, Deep Beauty, in 2020. At Harvard University in the late 1960’s, she was a student in Robert Lowell’s class, “The King James Bible as English Literature.”
David Keplinger is a poet, translator, professor, and certified teacher of mindfulness. On April 23, 2025 it was announced that he is the recipient of the 2025 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. David is the author of Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023) and seven other collections of poetry, including The World to Come (Conduit Books, 2021), winner of the 2020 Minds on Fire Prize and Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize. Among his earlier books are The Most Natural Thing (New Issues, 2013) and The Prayers of Others (New Issues, 2006) which won the Colorado Book Award. His first collection, The Rose Inside, was selected by Mary Oliver for the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize. Other honors include The Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Prize, the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
About Invited to the Feast
“Do not hurry your journey,” the poet says midway through this stunning collection. “Better if it lasts for years, so you arrive / laden with all you’ve lost along the way.” Bonnie Naradzay’s journey—as mother, professional, teacher, and longtime volunteer, leading poetry sessions in prisons, a retirement community, and among the homeless—has gathered much of both the lost and found, culminating in the publication of Invited to the Feast, a collection of poems and literary debut coming in her eightieth year.
With wisdom gleaned over time and craft honed over decades, Naradzay presents us with poems that range from dank encampments under city bridges to windswept Irish cliffs and Venetian vistas, finding a common human thread in street talk and the classic tropes of myth and our shared literary heritage.
Invited to the Feast is divided into three sections, each beginning with an epigraph that serves as a guide to reading each part. The poems collected here immerse the reader in the experience of interactive poetry classes, laments for mentors and family members who have gone, and far-flung travels. Free verse consorts with a diversity of forms, including the villanelle, ghazal, pantoum, sestina, and a poem in quatrains with the syllable count of sapphics.
Throughout this collection we sense that, despite loss and brokenness, love is still possible, and every one of us has been invited to this feast.
If you need an accommodation for this event, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.
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