POETS @ PACE:
Aisha Sasha John & Lewis Warsh
Time & Place: Monday, November 2, 6-8 p.m., Bianco Room
The poets Aisha Sasha John and Lewis Warsh are the fall 2015 readers in the Poets @ Pace series. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place Nov. 2nd from 6-8 p.m. in the Bianco Room, Level B, One Pace Plaza. It will include a Q & A, book signing, and refreshments. Poets @ Pace, which brings important poets to the Pace NYC campus each semester, is organized by Pace Poet-in-Residence Charles North and sponsored by the Office of the Provost.
Aisha Sasha John was born in Montreal, grew up in Vancouver, and currently lives in Toronto. She is a dance improviser as well as a highly praised poet. Her most recent book of poetry, Thou (2014), was a finalist for the Trillium Poetry Prize. She has performed in Hamilton, Kelowna, Marrakech, Montreal, New York, Oakland, San Francisco and Vancouver. In 2013 she was a UNESCO-Aschberg laureate artist, attending Dar Al-Ma’mun in Morocco. Of her recent book, Michael Nardone wrote: “Thou is physical, fearless in its vulnerabilities, a sensing amid thought’s most succulent folds… a poet of centrifugal energy, of reverberant intimacy.” The Trillium Book Award jury called Thou “original, funny, sensuous; at once profound and unpretentious.”
Lewis Warsh, a native New Yorker, has published over 30 books of poetry, fictionand autobiography and has received grants from the NEA, the NY State Council on the Arts, The Poets foundation, and the Fund for Poetry. He was an active member of The Poetry Project from its early days and co-edited the influential poetry magazines Angel Hair (with Anne Waldman) and United Artists (with Bernadette Mayer). Currently he teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Long Island University (Brooklyn). Christopher Sorrentino has commented: “Lewis Warsh uses ordinary language as a means to an extraordinary inventiveness.” Thurston Moore: “Warsh moves through the crowded street, a reporter, pad in hand and pencil behind ear. The sentences hold the simple truths of his heart. That amidst the nearly incomprehensible violence of daily life one reality is a singular desire—love.”