TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 7pm – POETRY
The Moonstone Poetry Series Presents
ELISE PASCHEN
KARL KIRCHWEY
Elise Paschen, a poet of Osage descent, is the co-founder and co-editor of Poetry in Motion, a program which places poetry posters in subways and buses across the country. Her latest book, which she will be reading from, is called BESTIARY. The daughter of renowned prima ballerina, Maria Tallchief, and Chicago builder Henry D. Paschen, she was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where she attended the Francis W. Parker School. A graduate of Harvard University, she holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees in 20th Century British and American Literature from Oxford University.
Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Ploughshares and Shenandoah.
Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America from 1988 until 2001, she recently was appointed the Poet Laureate of Three Oaks, Michigan. She was the featured Illinois poet at the National Book Festival sponsored by the Library of Congress in September 2006. Dr. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Stuart Brainerd, and their two children.
Karl Kirchwey holds degrees in English Literature from Yale College (B.A.) and Columbia University (M.A.). He is the author of five books of poems: A Wandering Island (Princeton University Press, 1990; recipient of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America), Those I Guard (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1993), The Engrafted Word (Henry Holt, 1998; a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”), At the Palace of Jove (Putnam, 2002) and The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose (2007). His play in verse entitled Airedales & Cipher, based on the Alcestis of Euripides, received the 1997 Paris Review Prize for Poetic Drama and has been presented in public readings at An Appalachian Summer Festival (Boone, North Carolina) and at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York. His poems have appeared in periodicals such as Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Criterion, The New Republic The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Parnassus, Partisan Review, Poetry (Chicago), Slate, The Southwest Review, Tin House, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. His poems and translations have been anthologized in works including The KGB Bar Book of Poems (2000), The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1987-1998 (1998), Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry: a Bilingual Anthology (1996), Twentieth Century Poems on the Gospels: an Anthology (1996), and After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1995).
