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Poetry and Music: Readings by David Blair, Stephanie Burt, Dan Chiasson and Andrea Cohen, and music by Jean-Paul Vest

  • The Lilypad 1353 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA, 02139 (map)

$10 Cover ($25 w/ Book) / Start 4:15pm / Doors 4pm / Seated Show

David Blair

David Blair lives in Somerville with family. He is the author of six books, including his latest collection True Figures, Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021, now available from MadHat Press. He teaches poetry at the University of New Hampshire in the MFA Writing Program.

madhat-press.com/products/true-figures-by-david-blair

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press.syr.edu/supressbooks/406/friends-with-dogs

Stephanie Burt

Stephanie Burt's newest book is We Are Mermaids. is a professor of English at Harvard. Her books of poetry include Advice from the Lights (2017), Belmont (2013), and Parallel Play (2006), all from Graywolf Press, and Popular Music (1999). Her books of literary criticism include Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (2019), The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (2016); and Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

graywolfpress.org/books/we-are-mermaids

graywolfpress.org/books/advice-lights

poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephanie-burt

Dan Chiasson

Dan Chiasson is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Bicentennial (2014), and a book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America (2007), and, always a Vermonter, he is working on a biography of Bernie Sanders. His essays on poetry appear widely. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College.

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646885/the-math-campers-by-dan-chiasson/

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/225278/bicentennial-by-dan-chiasson

Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny ReviewThe Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer TrainThe Hudson Review, etc. 

A new book of poems, Everything, was published by Four Way Books in 2021. Other collections include Nightshade (Four Way, 2019). Unfathoming (Four Way, 2017),  Furs Not Mine (Four Way, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer's Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999). 

Cohen’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at MacDowell.

She is currently teaching in the MFA program at Boston University. Cohen directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA, and she has recently taught at the Fin Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She directs the Blacksmith House reading series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

fourwaybooks.com/site/andrea-cohen

poetryfoundation.org/poets/andrea-cohen

andreacohen.org

Jean-Paul Vest

Never content to stay with one musical style for long, Jean-Paul Vest’s musical restlessness stems from a life on the move. Born in Alabama to a boogie-woogie piano player and a French school teacher, by the time he was a sophomore in high school, Vest had lived in four different states, spent a year behind the iron curtain in Romania, and a summer exploring Europe on his own. High school in Texas was followed by college in the Bronx, which in turn gave way to a series of jobs ranging from church organist to forklift operator, and eventually to a career in publishing. Each stop brought new cultures, new cadences of speech, and new music to explore. 

So it’s little wonder that his songs read like a collection of postcards. Snapshots of familiar places. Letters from dear friends and distant relatives. Some offer (as a friend once wrote), “wry, plain-spoken observations of the quiet joys and terrors of normal life,” while others are densely packed swathes of cinematic pop.

In 2004, Vest formed the band Last Charge of the Light Horse as a vehicle for his off-beat tunes. To date, the group has released five albums and two EPs, gaining mention in several "Best of the Year" lists and heavy rotation on college radio, charting as high as #1 on stations in the U.S.

lastcharge.com

lastchargeofthelighthorse.bandcamp.com

soundcloud.com/lastcharge

instagram.com/lastchargeofthelighthorse

youtube.com/jean-paulvest

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