Poems of Environmental & Social Justice

Jane Satterfield & Ned Balbo

Tuesday, 10 Nov 2015 at 7:00 pm – Campanile Room, Memorial Union

From their unique perspectives, poets Jane Satterfield and Ned Balbo engage personal and public history through an awareness of the challenges that shape our contemporary moment.

Jane Satterfield is the author of four books, including Daughters of Empire: a Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond, and Her Familiars, a collection of poetry. Satterfield's honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, the Florida Review Editors' Prize, the Mslexia women's poetry prize, and the Bellingham Review's 49th Parallel Poetry Prize. She has served as the literary editor for the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, and she is an associate professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.

Ned Balbo is the author of three books, including, most recently, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems, which was awarded the 2010 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the Poets' Prize. Balbo currently teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. His honors include the John Guyon Nonfiction Award, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and three Maryland Arts Council grants. His fourth book, Upcycling Paumanok, which poet Mark Jarman has lauded as "the vital history of one of the crucial American places," is forthcoming in 2016. Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writers Series

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Jane Satterfield is also the author of Shepherdess with an Automatic and Assignation at Vanishing Point. She is the recipient of three Maryland Arts Council grants and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her work has been awarded the Pirate's Alley Gold Medal in the Essay from the Faulkner Society, the Heekin Foundation's Cuchulain Prize for Rhetoric in the Essay, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Notre Dame Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Antioch Review, The Journal, Bellingham Review, and Elixir.

What the Critics Have Said

NED BALBO
"One of the things I love about The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems is how pop culture references to the monsters and heroes of horror films, science fiction novels and television series, sprinkled throughout, are not glibly hip, but both personal and universalizing - we see them for the modern mythology they are. The father of modern horror, Edgar Allan Poe, himself provides a thread running through this book-length meditation on adoption and identity, on love and heartbreak, alienation and belonging."
A. E. Stallings, poet & translator, author of Hapax: Poems and Olives: Poems


JANE SATTERFIELD
"Fascinating and revelatory, Her Familiars explores the culture of war and female experience through a varied and lively mix of forms. Here we find epistles, refrains, litanies, elegies, and even a poem inspired by the iTunes party shuffle function."
Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables: Poems and coauthor of The Tilted World: A Novel

Jane Satterfield brings an astonishing range of subjects to Her Familiars, handling them with keen intelligence, musical intricacy, and tonal dexterity. Here, she tells of a child's encounter of tragedy through a poetry recitation, or the life of an exemplary (and little known) woman ceramic artist, or the collapse of human communities through history (concluding, disconcertingly, with the vanishing of bees today). Jane Satterfield's poems are intimate, graceful, and brilliant, composed around issues of social and political importance.
Kevin Prufer, author of Fallen From a Chariot and In a Beautiful Country

Cosponsored By:

• English
• MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
• Pearl Hogrefe Fund
• Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)