May 17, 2019

6 – 8 pm

at The Fleisher Art Memorial

719 Catherine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147

free and open to the public

As a part of the city-wide Whitman at 200 festival, The American Poetry Review presents Angles of Approach: Poets Respond to Whitman, a reading by four Philadelphia poets: Ditta Baron Hoeber, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Elaine Terranova, and Elizabeth Scanlon, who will each read from their own work and reflect upon Whitman's influence on the practice of poetry in America.

Ditta Baron Hoeber is an artist and a poet.  Her recent poetry publications have been in Contemporary American Voices, the American Journal of Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Construction Magazine, New American Writing, Window Cat and Per Contra, along with a suite of her photographs.  In 2018 she received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize.

Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Salvage: Poems and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water. A three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, her poetry has appeared widely online and in print.  She has been awarded the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor’s Prize in Poetry, and scholarships from the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) and Vermont Studio Center. As a 2016 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grantee, she partnered with Asian Arts Initiative to create Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets in Philadelphia, and in 2017, she received the Leeway Foundation Transformation Award. 

Elizabeth Scanlon is the Editor of The American Poetry Review. She is the author of Lonesome Gnosis (Horsethief Books, 2017) and the chapbooks The Brain Is Not the United States/The Brain Is the Ocean (The Head & The Hand Press, 2016), and Odd Regard (Ixnay Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, The Boston Review, and Ploughshares, and her honors include a Pushcart Prize and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship.

Elaine Terranova has published six collections of poems, most recently Dollhouse, which won the 2013 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks. Her poems and prose have appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies and her translation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis was published by the Penn Greek Drama Series. Her awards include grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, NEA And Pew fellowships, and a Pushcart Prize. She is presently working on a childhood memoir.