Friday, March 7 @ 7pm, Hallwalls

Laynie Browne is the author of seven collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent publications include: The Scented Fox, recipient of the 2007 National Poetry Series Award, selected by Alice Notley (Wave Books); Daily Sonnets (Counterpath Books, 2007), and Drawing of a Swan Before Memory, winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2005). Of Daily Sonnets Ron Silliman writes: “It’s a stunner and a delight. A pure dose of heady oxygen” and “…an icon for the generation of poets who are about to show up.” With others she helped to start the Ear Inn reading series in New York, and is a member of the Subtext Collective in Seattle, and now is part of the POG reading series in Tucson, Arizona. She has taught creative writing at The University of Washington, Bothell, at Mills College in Oakland and at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona.

Sina Queyras is the author of the poetry collections Slip, Teethmarks and Lemon Hound, which won the Pat Lowther Award and a Lambda Award. In 2005 she edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, for Persea Books. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers and Haverford College. Currently she is Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary.

Derek Walcott @ Babel

Poet Derek Walcott is the third author in the inaugural season of Babel, Just Buffalo Literary Society’s high-flying speaker series that features renowned writers from around the globe.

Last year Walcott’s Selected Poems was released by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, but his most famous work is Omeros. Released in 1990, Omeros is an epic poem set in the poet’s native St. Lucia, which uses the characters, plots and themes of the Odyssey (as well as a broad range of other classical texts, including Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno) as a means to explore the many cultures and histories that overlap on the Caribbean island. Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature two years after the poem’s release.

The Babel series led off with Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk last November and continued with Ariel Dorfman the following month. Walcott comes to Asbury Hall at Babeville next Thursday, March 13. (Visit justbuffalo.org or call 832-5400 for tickets and more information.)