Poetry Night with Sandra Sidman Larson and Joyce Sutphen

This event will be a dialogue between two women, born more than a decade apart, whose poetry themes intersect and diverge in insightful ways. How did each of them think of the Sixties, Civil Rights, or being a parent? Sandra and Joyce will reflect on their shared experiences and read poems from their latest books to illustrate what they have learned.

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And Now What Shall We Do? A Memoir in Poetry spans Sandra Sidman Larson's long life of political and social justice activity, encompassing the concerns of war and peace, poverty and wealth, racism and bigotry, health care and social justice, the environment, and the need to save our planet, along with love in all its forms. As the title implies, the book is written in an evolving genre of writing which includes essays, prose, narrative, and lyric poetry.

Sandra Sidman Larson grew up in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City. Her professional career encompassed many decades of work in the nonprofit world of social services and justice in Minnesota where she has lived for the past 50 years. Poetry became her avocation in 1985 when she began classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. In 2011 she was selected for and participated in a manuscript development tract at the Loft. She has published in journals throughout the United States and in England, twice being nominated for a Pushcart Prize, once by Naomi Shihab Nye. Sandra was a manuscript finalist for the Lost Horse Press’ Idaho Prize for Poetry in 2013, and the Trio House Press Trio Award in 2015. She has published seven books of poetry. This Distance in My Hands (Main Street Rag, 2017), With No Intention of Arrival (Cup and Spiral Books, 2021), and And Now What Shall We Do? A Memoir in Poetry (Cup and Spiral Books, 2022) are her most recent. She currently administers a Facebook group entitled Minnesota Poets and Writers which has over one thousand members.

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That Other Life is a lyric narrative about how relationships fail and succeed—or rather, about how the narrator fares on the changeable course of love and domestic commerce. Most of the poems in Joyce Sutphen’s twelfth book are sonnets, and each sonnet provides a glimpse of a swiftly moving life. In the same carefully crafted language as she uses to describe an oat binder, Sutphen surveys marriage and love.

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Stearns County, Minnesota. Her first book of poetry, Straight Out of View, won the Barnard New Women’s Poets Prize Press,1995). Her second book of poems, Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and her third book, Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press, 2004), won the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Her recent books are Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), This Long Winter (Carnegie Mellon Press 2021), and That Other Life (2023). She served as the Minnesota Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2021, succeeding Robert Bly, and she is professor emerita hof literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

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