News & Events Poets Honor Moore, Joan Larkin to Read from Poems From the Women’s Movement at Amherst College Sept. 16

August 27, 2009
Ellen Miller-Mack
ellenmiller-mack@comcast.net

AMHERST, Mass.—On Wednesday, Sept. 16, at 7:30 p.m. in Cole Assembly Room of Converse Hall, Amherst College will host a celebration of and reading from the anthology Poems From the Women’s Movement, edited by Honor Moore and published by Library of America, now in its second printing. During the event, poets Joan Larkin and Honor Moore will read their poems and the work of others in the book. Audre Lorde’s daughter, Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins and several students from the Five Colleges will also join them in reading other poems in the anthology. The reading, which will be followed by a reception and book signing, is free and open to the public.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” These lines by Muriel Rukeyser epitomize the spirit that animated a whole generation of women poets who, in exploring the unspoken truths of their lives, sparked a literary revolution. Moore’s anthology presents 58 poets whose work defines an era (the 1960s to the 1980s), including Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Sonia Sanchez, May Swenson, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Ann Waldman, Sharon Olds, Diane Di Prima, Lucille Clifton, Judy Grahn, Alice Notley and Eileen Myles.

Poems From the Women’s Movement, selected by O Magazine, is number 15 on Oprah’s Book Club’s summer reading list.

Larkin’s newest book, My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press), received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award.

Moore’s recent memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Lorde-Rollins is a poet and a physician who practices adolescent gynecology in New York City.

Sponsors of the gathering include the Amherst College English and Women’s and Gender Studies departments and Creative Writing program, The Massachusetts Review, the Poetry Center at Smith College, Perugia Press, Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College and The Everywoman’s Center at the University of Massachusetts.