Tuesday, September 21, 2010

October 19: Ruth Lepson and Joanna Smith Rakoff

Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music and has been collaborating with jazz musicians and a few classical ones in recent years. Her books of poems are Dreaming in Color, which was published by Alice James Books along with Alice Mattison’s book of poems, Animals, lo these many years ago; Morphology, a book of synaesthetic moments from dreams written as prose poems, along with photographs of hers and artist Rusty Crump; and I Went Looking for You. The last two were published by blazevox.org. You can see Morphology at their website as it’s a free ebook as well as a printed book. Ruth edited Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology, published by the U of Illinois. Her poems and prose have been in Jacket, Harvard Review, The Boston Phoenix, EOAGH, Shampoo, Carve, Agni, and many other periodicals and online magazines. She used to organize poetry readings for Oxfam America. She lives in Cambridge.

Joanna Smith Rakoff is the author of the novel A Fortunate Age, which was a New York Times Editors' Pick, a winner of the Elle Readers' Prize, a selection of Barnes and Noble's First Look Book Club, an IndieNext pick, and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. As a journalist and critic, she's written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post Book World, the Boston Globe, Vogue, Time Out New York, O:The Oprah Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. She has degrees from Columbia University; University College, London; and Oberlin College. You can read some of her articles and essays at her webpage.