Join poets Cynthia Cruz, Carlie Hoffman, and Allison Benis White for a remote reading and celebration in honor of Cynthia Cruz’s newest collection of poetry, Back to the Woods (Four Way Books, 2023).
About the presenters:
Cynthia Cruz is the author of eight collections of poems: Back to the Woods (2023), Hotel Oblivion (Four Way Books, 2022), Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020), Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018), How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012) and Ruin (Alice James Books, 2006) as well as a novel, Steady Diet of Nothing, (Four Way Books, 2023). Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays exploring the concept of silence, was published by Book*hug in the spring of 2019. The Melancholia of Class, an exploration of melancholia and the working class, was published by Repeater Books in July of 2021.
Cruz earned a BA in English Literature at Mills College, an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in Art Writing from the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in German Language and Literature from Rutgers University. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. Her collection, Hotel Oblivion, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School where her research focuses on Hegel and madness.
Carlie Hoffman is the author When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. She is the translator from the German of Weiße Schatten / White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2023). Carlie’s honors include the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review poetry prize, a Poets & Writers Amy Award, the Loose Translation Award, and fellowships from Columbia University and the City University of New York and her work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Boston Review, New England Review, Jewish Currents and other publications. Carlie lives in Brooklyn, where she edits Small Orange Journal and is a Lecturer of creative writing at the State University of New York at Purchase.
Allison Benis White is the author of The Wendys; Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry and named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside.