The Writer’s Center welcomes the editors and essayists of Deep Beauty: Experiencing Wonder When the World Is on Fire for select readings and a discussion of ways to find beauty in these turbulent and unprecedented times. Co-editors Rosemary Winslow and Catherine Lee are joined by contributors Nancy Naomi Carlson, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Yael Flusberg and Bonnie Naradzay, plus a special reading from the late Stanley Plumly’s featured essay.
RSVP below, and you’ll receive login info for joining the chat via our video conferencing platform, Zoom. FREE and open to the public, all times Eastern. Limited space.
We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or from Bookshop.org.
Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor who has authored eleven titles (seven translated). She has received two Literature Translation Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as grants from the Maryland Council for the Arts, and Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County, and was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, as well as the CLMP Firecracker Poetry Award. Her co-edited anthology, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press) and her translation of Kahl Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull) appeared in 2021. An Infusion of Violets was released by Seagull Books in 2019, and was featured in the New York Book Review (“New & Noteworthy”). Nancy’s work has appeared in such journals as the American Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, the Paris Review, and Poetry. To learn more about her work, visit www.nancynaomicarlson.com.
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, winner of the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and Haint, (Gival Press) winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. A Cave Canem fellow and a member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, she lives in Maryland with her husband, poet Hayes Davis, and their two children. Their website is poetsandparents.com.
Early on, as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Catherine Lee conducted a prison interview with a teenage inmate convicted of killing his abusive father, learning that the best stories are about relationships, good and bad. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post and Foreign Policy magazine’s Guide to Graduate Education. She covered education for a weekly paper in Washington, DC, and worked for 17 years at the Catholic University of America as a writer, editor, and director of communications. Now a freelance writer, she lives with her husband in DC. They have three children and two grandchildren.
When she was 16, Yael Flusberg’s creative writing teacher, Frank McCourt, suggested she had the makings of a memoir within. She thought him daft but appreciated how he let her sit on the wide window ledge rather than be confined to an ancient wooden desk; she never cut his class. A decade later, Yael found poetry, which helped her exteriorize the legacy of being the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Now 50, she feels ready to heed elders’ advice. Yael teaches yoga and writing. Her work has appeared in Lilith, Beltway Poetry Journal, and NPR’s Latino USA. For more information, visit yaelflusberg.com.
Bonnie Naradzay is a poet and essayist who leads poetry classes and writing workshops at a retirement center and a homeless day shelter, both in Washington DC. In this way, she continues to learn from the wisdom of others. She taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer in South India in the early 1970s after earning an MA in literature from Harvard University. Following a long career with the federal government, she earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Southern Maine and then graduated with an MA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
The late Stanley Plumly was professor and director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Maryland. His writing includes books of poetry (Orphan Hours, Old Heart, Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me, The Marriage in the Trees, and Against Sunset); criticism, Argument and Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry; and a highly acclaimed biography, Posthumous Keats. His many awards include a Guggenheim and three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, and Maryland State poet laureateship.
Rosemary Winslow is a writer, researcher, and teacher living in Washington, DC, with her husband, John Winslow, a visual artist. She grew up on a dairy farm in western New York, where the land, climate, trees, fields, and mammals offered both harshness and beauty. Hiking, swimming, gardening, yoga, and volunteering keep her in close touch with land and community. She appears in a new two-part film about Walt Whitman, offering commentary about the American poet. Titled “In Search of Walt Whitman,” the movie is available on YouTube. Part One can be viewed here; Part Two is available here.
