Thursday, May 31, 7pm – Poetry
Lili Bita, Lamont Steptoe, Robert Zaller
Internationally-renowned author and actress Lili Bita will read from her new memoir of her late son Philip, The Storm Rider. Lili Bita is the author of some twenty books of verse, fiction, memoir, and translation, and has performed on stage on three continents. Author, actress, and musician, Lili Bita has been one of contemporary Greece’s foremost cultural ambassadors. The brilliant interpretations of Greek culture and history in her acclaimed one-woman shows, “The Greek Woman Through the Ages” and “Freedom or Death,” have brought the legacy off Hellenism around the world. Her own poetry and fiction have won praise from such figures as Nikos Kazantzakis, Anais Nin, and Kenneth Rexroth. Tasos Athanasiadis, the former director of the Greek National Theater, calls her “among the most talented women of her generation.”
Robert Zaller is a history professor at Drexel University, a playwright and poet, and a critic whose contributions have appeared in the New York Times and The Nation and locally in the Inquirer, Seven Arts, the Welcomat, Philadelphia Forum and Schuylkill Valley Journal. Robert is the author of a major new study from Stanford University Press, Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime.
“Robert Zaller’s book sets out to be the fullest and most detailed explication of Jeffers’ large body of poetry and his literary career, and it delivers on that ambition. It is the best single critical book about Jeffers and sets a benchmark that will be difficult to meet, let alone surpass.”—Albert Gelpi, Emeritus, Stanford University
Lamont B. Steptoe is a poet / photographer / publisher born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is author of many books of poetry including In the Kitchens of the Master, Mad Minute, Uncle’s South Sea China Blue Nightmare, Cat Fish and Neckbone Jazz, Dusty Road, Common Salt and Trinkets and Beads. Steptoe is a father, Vietnam veteran, and founder of Whirlwind Press. He has read his work at the Library of Congress, the National Library of Nicaragua, the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, the Knitting Factory, the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, and colleges and universities throughout the United States. Steptoe is also an activist in human rights, environmental issues, and gay/bisexual issues.
