The Ordinary Evening Reading Series begins its 2007 season with poet April Bernard and novelist Roya Hakakian, appearing on January 23 at 7 PM in The Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room. Check this site frequently for announcements of the balance of our season, which will feature playwrights, poets, and novelists, including novelist Fred Dillen and poet Lloyd Schwartz.
April Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose most recent collection of poems is Swan Electric. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Agni, The Southwest Review, and many other magazines. She has received the Walt Whitman Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Sidney Harmon Fellowship, and an award in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation. April Bernard teaches literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont. She will read from her forthcoming collection, In a Stolen Boat.
Roya Hakakian’s memoir, Journey from the Land of No– about a girlhood in revolutionary Iran– recently won the Connecticut Book Award; The Washington Post called it a “moving narrative” that “swings from funny to sad.” She is a former associate producer at CBS’s 60 Minutes and a documentary filmmaker, as well as the author of two acclaimed volumes of poetry in Persian and a contributor to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
