Poetry Night with Mary Moore Easter & Robert Hedin

Mary Moore Easter introduces this new collection, her fifth, with a vivid rendering of her open-heart surgery and the removal of a life-threatening aneurism. She recounts the vicissitudes of more than a year of healing and gradual recovery, during which time she was motivated and inspired by many sources inside and outside her culture, including her connection to ancestral West Africa. Making use of modern technology, several poems are accompanied by QR codes through which readers can listen to Easter sing her songs, reveling in the link between her spoken ancestry and the legacy alive in her children and grandchildren. In the midst of widespread political turmoil, Easter’s new collection celebrates the renewal of life that surgery has made possible and the ardor that accompanies it. These poems sing, dance, and love, on the edge of the mysterious precipice that shapes our lifespan.

Mary Moore Easter is the author of four books of poetry: From the Flutes of Our Bones, The Body of the World (Minnesota Book Award Finalist, 2019), Walking from Origins, and Free Papers. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Christian Century, Water~Stone, SoFloPoJo, and other publications, as well as several anthologies. Her work has been used as texts for art songs; she was Poet-in-Residence for the 2022 Source Song Festival. Born during segregation in Petersburg, Virginia, to parents on the faculty of Virginia State College (now University), Easter was as immersed in their artistic and intellectual interests as she was in the limitations that segregation imposed on her Black world. Her adult career as an independent dancer/choreographer and founder and director of Carleton College’s dance program overlapped with writing as a Cave Canem Fellow at the foundation for African American poetry. Her awards include Pushcart Prize-nominations, a Bush Artist Fellowship in Choreography, multiple McKnight Awards in Interdisciplinary Arts, and The Loft Literary Center’s Creative Non-Fiction Award. In 2022, Carleton College named the new studios in the Weitz Center for Creativity to honor her legacy: the Mary Easter Dance Studios.

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Dancing with Columbus gathers together fifty-two new poems by award-winning Minnesota poet, translator, and editor Robert Hedin. Employing spare, imagistic language, this wide-ranging volume is filled with beautifully crafted poems exploring the themes of loss and reclamation, the integrity of everyday events, and our proper place in the natural world with all its seasonal turnings. One poem, leavened with the gentlest irony, describes how a farmer named Gustavson “found religion” during a thunderstorm. Another chronicles the migration of waterfowl and monarch butterflies downstream in late fall. One short series deals with the brief heyday of blimps during the 1930s. The title poem, tinged with nostalgia, describes a childhood memory of ad hoc boxing lessons behind an abandoned boat yard. As poet Joyce Sutphen puts it, these are poems of “putting one’s ego aside and letting the craft do its work.”

Born and raised in Red Wing, Minnesota, Robert Hedin is the author, translator, and editor of more than two dozen books of poetry and prose. The recipient of many honors and awards for his work, including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships as well as fellowships from the Bush, McKnight, and Yaddo Foundations, he has taught at the University of Alaska, the University of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, and Wake Forest University. He is co-founder and former director of the Anderson Center at Tower View, a residential artist retreat in Red Wing. His work has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and in the nationally syndicated column, American Life in Poetry. He lives in Frontenac, Minnesota.

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