Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com
City Art Presents Robin Becker and Natasha Sajé
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday November 6th 7:00—9:00 P.M.
Writers
Robin Becker and Natasha Sajé will read from their work November 6th
at 7:00 P.M. at the Salt Lake City Public Library as part of the City Art
Reading Series.
Poet Robin Becker was born in
Philadelphia and earned a BA and MA at Boston University. She taught for many
years at the MIT before returning to Pennsylvania in 1994, where she is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State. Becker’s many
collections of poetry include Personal Effects (1977); Backtalk (1982); Giacometti’s Dog (1990); All-American Girl (1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award; The Horse Fair (2000); Domain of Perfect Affection (2006); Tiger Heron (2014); and The Black Bear Inside Me (2018). Becker’s
range of subjects has been described as a “vibrant miscellany.” Her poems
reflect her Russian-Jewish heritage and queer identity, her interest in art
history and visual art, the experience of growing up in 1950s America, and the
legacy of the 1960s. In The Horse Fair, her subjects range from the painter Rosa Bonheur to the
Torah and personal tragedies. Poet Kathleen Aguero has said that Becker’s poems
are “richly populated by friends, lovers, family” as they “chronicle a search
for community.”Becker’s work has appeared widely in magazines and
journals, including American Poetry Review, the Boston Globe, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is a
contributing editor to Ploughshares and poetry editor for the Women’s Review of Books, where she writes a column called “Field Notes.” Becker
also teaches workshops at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. She has won
fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation,
and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 she was honored with Penn
State's George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, and she served as
Penn State Laureate in 2010-11.
Poet Natasha Sajé is the author of the collections Vivarium (Tupelo 2014), Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994), and Bend (Tupelo Press, 2004), and many essays. Her work has been honored with the Robert Winner and Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards, a Fulbright fellowship, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, and the Utah Book Award. Saje’s poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in many periodicals, including The Henry James Review, American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, New Republic, Poetry, Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, Shenandoah, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The New York Times. Sajé is a professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, and has been teaching in the Vermont College M.F.A. in Writing program since 1996.
The event is free and open to the public. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations.