Poet Andy Young reads from All Night It Is Morning Thursday, November 6, 7:30 pm Pegasus Books on Solano 1855, Solano Ave, Berkeley |
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Join us as we celebrate the publication of All Night It Is Morning, the debut poetry collection from Pegasus Books alumnus Andy Young. This event is supported by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation. Wheelchair accessible; refreshments served.
About All Night It Is Morning:
Andy Young’s debut poetry collection cuts across geography, politics, language, and culture. Raised in Appalachia, rooted in New Orleans, and now part of an Egyptian/American family with whom she spent the last two years in Cairo, hers is an American perspective that is refreshingly outward-looking. The poems reflect on living life with a foot in both Arabic and Western cultures but reach beyond the personal to inhabit other realms: from a saucy Cleopatra to a coal miner emerging from a mine collapse, from the ruins of post-Katrina New Orleans to the tumultuous events of the Egyptian revolution. Using the aubade, the traditional form of lovers parting at dawn, to anchor the book, Young examines destruction in the wake of storms, wars and revolution, but also at the ways in which we connect within these disasters. These poems exhibit what Daniel Tobin calls “astonishing formal variety,” embracing the lyric, narrative, fragmentary, as well as traditional forms such as the sonnet. The book’s cover, a graffiti mural by Alaa Awad, now destroyed, that led the way to Tahrir Square, is a work both ancient and modern, urban and agrarian, beautiful and horrible. This captures the spirit of the book, steeped in mourning and hope and a belief in the voice of the people.
About Andy Young:
Andy Young grew up in southern West Virginia and has spent most of her adult life in New Orleans working at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. With her partner, Khaled Hegazzi, she translates poetry from the Arabic and founded Meena, a bilingual literary journal, in 2005. For the last two years she has lived in Egypt, where she worked at the American University in Cairo and documented the revolution in essays, poems and photographs. A graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, her writing has been published in three chapbooks, publications in Lebanon, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico and throughout the United States in places such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Callaloo, Guernica, and the Norton anthology Language for a New Century. Her work also been featured in Pasion Flamenca’s play “Flamenclorico: Lore of the Miners,” performed at the Joyce Theater, Public Radio International’s “The World,” the jewelry designs of Jeanine Payer, in Santa Fe’s public buses, and in SUNY’s Drawn from Disaster exhibit and Paul Chan’s Tree of Life project for the New Museum.
Praise for All Night It Is Morning:
"Andy Young's amazing poems pledge allegiance to life. They have witnessed, travelled and gathered so much elemental power and light, they can't stop giving it back." —Naomi Shihab Nye, author of You and Yours, winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. "The kind of nonconformist seeing and feeling that Andy Young performs in All Night It Is Morning agitates a reader towards a more humane and communal understanding of our collective journey, far beyond continents and lands to the singular realm of the heart. These poems, "chanting [our] conjured glamour," maintain a music that urges us toward prayer and dance." —Major Jackson, author of Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn "All Night It Is Morning is an arresting collection! Brave ruminations on places that come apart and reassemble." —Nathalie Handal, editor of The Poetry of Arab Women