Thursday, April 7, 2011, at 7:00pm, poets John Hennessy and Caroline Knox will read as part of the fourth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge Street, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

John Hennessy

John Hennessy is the author of the collection Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point, 2007), and his poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The New Republic, Poetry, The Yale Review, What’s Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey, and Best New Poets 2005. He grew up in New Jersey, went to Princeton on a Cane Scholarship, and completed graduate degrees at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Arkansas. Since 2003 he has taught at the University of Massachusetts and lived with his family in Amherst. Hennessy is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, and he is the poetry editor of The Common, a new magazine based at Amherst College’s Frost Library. He has received several prizes in different genres, including the Transatlantic Review Award in Fiction from the Henfield Foundation, and in 2007-2008 he held the Resident Fellowship in Poetry at the Amy Clampitt House.

Caroline Knox

Caroline Knox’s seventh collection, Nine Worthies, appeared in 2010 from Wave Books. Quaker Guns (Wave 2008) received a Recommended Reading Award 2009 from the Massachusetts Center for the Book. He Paves the Road with Iron Bars (Verse 2004) won the Maurice English Award 2005 for a book by a poet over 50. A Beaker: New and Selected Poems appeared from Verse in 2002. Her previous books are The House Party and To Newfoundland (Georgia 1984, 1989) and Sleepers Wake (Timken 1994).

Knox’s work has appeared in American Scholar, A Public Space, Boston Review, Fulcrum, Harvard, Massachusetts Review, New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry ( whose Bess Hokin Prize she has won), Providence Sunday Journal, Times Literary Supplement, TriQuarterly, and Yale Review. Her poems have been in Best American Poetry 1988 and 1994, and on Poetry Daily. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center (Lannan Senior Fellowship), the Massachusetts Cultural Council (1996, 2006), The Fund for Poetry, and the Yale/Mellon Visiting Faculty Program. She was the judge for the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America in Spring 2003, and was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard in 2002-2003. In 2007, she was a juror for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; in 2008, a Poetry Reviewer for the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowships Program.

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[NATHANIEL: HOLDEN CHAPEL] / by Caroline Knox

Father drew his beautiful pilasters for the college chapel in 1744,
when I was old enough to begin to understand his touch. The
pilasters in pairs surround the small building, recalling in little the
Parthenon, sacred to Pallas, and recalling as well the standing but-
tresses of medieval Christendom. The chapel site suggests the advent
of a new quadrangle. The Holden crest nestles in the pediment, white
and marmoreal.
….Mother and Father and I heard the service read. The round arches
of the door and windows lack ornament entirely. But then soon after
this, at the capture of Louisbourg, Father received so many commis-
sions, grand and celebratory, triumphalistic. Brass and satin and er-
mine; great gestures; feathers, paste, wax.

(“[NATHANIEL: HOLDEN CHAPEL]” from Nine Worthies ©2011. Reprinted by permission of Wave Books. All rights reserved.)