Moonstone Poetry @ Brandywine Workshop
728 S. Broad Street
Monday September 29, 2014 – 7pm
Shane Book, Raina J. León, Rich Villar
Shane Book is a poet and filmmaker. His first collection, Ceiling of Sticks (University of Nebraska Press) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was a Poetry Society of America “New American Poet” Selection. His second collection, Congotronic, is a Kuhl House Poets Series Selection and will be published in the United States by the University of Iowa Press and in Canada by House of Anansi Press in the fall of 2014. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His honors include a New York Times Fellowship in Poetry, Fellowships to the Flaherty Film Seminar and the Telluride Film Festival, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a National Magazine Award. Based on a poem from Ceiling of Sticks, his award-winning debut film Dust is screening in festivals worldwide. His next film, Praise and Blame, stars Costas Mandylor and is currently in postproduction.
Raina J. León, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006), CantoMundo fellow, and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols, was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (2006). Her second book, Boogeyman Dawn (2013, Salmon Poetry), was a finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Prize (2010). She has received fellowships and residencies with Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latino and Latina arts. She is an assistant professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Rich Villar, a native of Paterson, New Jersey, is a freelance writer and editor and is the author of the poetry collection Comprehending Forever (Willow Books/Aquarius Press, 2014). He has been quoted on Latino literature and culture by both the New York Times and the Daily News, and his poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Renaissance Noire, Hanging Loose, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Amistad, Latino Poetry Review, and the acclaimed chapbook series Achiote Seeds. Rich Villar, a native of Paterson, New Jersey, is a freelance writer and editor and is the author of the poetry collection Comprehending Forever (Willow Books/Aquarius Press, 2014). He has been quoted on Latino literature and culture by both the New York Times and the Daily News, and his poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Renaissance Noire, Hanging Loose, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Amistad, Latino Poetry Review, and the acclaimed chapbook series Achiote Seeds.
