We are thrilled to feature three celebrated, Westchester-based poets - Ann Lauinger, Margo Stever, and Kate Knapp Johnson - for a reading and conversation about their collected works. It is rare to have such influential and accomplished writers together under one roof. Bring your open hearts and your curiosity to this powerful event. Information about each author and some of their books can be found below.
Books will be available for purchase and signing. This event is free, but we ask you to RSVP here for planning purposes.
About Ann Lauinger
Ann Lauinger’s books of poetry are Persuasions of Fall (University of Utah, 2004), Against Butterflies (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2013), and Dime Saint, Nickel Devil (Broadstone Books, 2022). She is a recipient of the Ernest J. Poetry Prize and the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and is also a translator. Her poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and in anthologies and magazines from Abandoned Mine to Zone 3, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature, The Cumberland River Review, Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Parnassus, Smartish Pace, and Southern Poetry Review. Professor emerita of medieval and Renaissance literature at Sarah Lawrence College, she is a former co-editor of Slapering Hol Press, serves on the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee, and lives with her husband and two cats in Ossining, NY.
What do you see? What does it mean to “see”? And who or what does the seeing? Whether it is the wildlife of Westchester or the contents of a silverware drawer, Ann Lauinger’s poems play with the possibilities. If human perception, mixed as it is with memory and imagination, must inevitably impose on what it sees, her poems also evoke the stubborn strangeness of creatures and things that bloom with their own resistant beauty.
About Margo Taft Stever
Margo Taft Stever’s three full-length poetry collections are The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022), winner of a 2022 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in Poetry; Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019) finalist with honorable mention for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize; and Frozen Spring, winner of the 2002 Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry. The latest of her four chapbooks is Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press, 2019). In 2022, Margo Taft Stever and Susana H. Case edited I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press) which received honorable mention for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Grand prize, was the sole winner of the 2022 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Anthologies, and was a finalist for the International Book and the American Book Fest Awards for Anthologies. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Plume, Verse Daily, “Poem-A-Day” on poets.org, Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, Cincinnati Review, upstreet, and Salamander. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. She also teaches a poetry workshop for at-risk adolescents at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children in Dobbs Ferry, New York. (www.margotaftstever.com).
Margo Taft Stever’s third full-length collection of poetry, THE END OF HORSES, is scheduled for publication by Broadstone Books in April, 2022. The focus of the book is on the sixth extinction, one of the greatest mass extinctions precipitated by humans, and encroachment of humans on animal habitat.
About THE END OF HORSES, Denise Duhamel has written: “The poems in Margo T. Stever’s THE END OF HORSES mourn our irreversible ecological change, in elegiac turns and odes to the beauty that remains. The speaker’s past is recast through a political lens, turbulent and haunting in retrospect. Stever’s eco-poetry emphasizes our enmeshment with tragedies we have created. Powerful, terrifying, and gorgeous, these poems are, above all, fearless.”
About Kate Knapp Johnson
Kate Knapp Johnson is the author of four collections of poetry, WHEN ORCHIDS WERE FLOWERS (Dragon Gate), THIS PERFECT LIFE (Miami Univ. Press), WIND SOMEWHERE, AND SHADE (Miami U.), and THE WIND-BIKE (Scattering Skies Press).
Kate is the recipient of a NYFA and two Gradiva awards, has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College for 33 years, and is a graduate of the Westchester Institute for Psychology and Psychoanalytic Studies. She lives in Somers, NY with her family and four hairy rescues--the latter being "Resident Evils," names withheld.
Kate Knapp Johnson will be reading from both earlier and new work.
“Kate Johnson is an ecstatic writer, a writer of overflowing spiritual awareness, but, particularly, her ecstasies are indistinguishable from her precisions, her clarities, her specificities, her power to atomize vision into image and drama and the exquisite human moment. Her poems are a stunning marriage of sight and what sight sees.”
- Vijay Seshadri, author of 3 Sections, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize