POETRY READING featuring JOHN BALABAN and SARAH HOWE

5.30 to 7pm on Weds 24th October in the Thomas Gray Room, Pembroke College

Open to all. Free of charge.

Free wine.

Poet Bios

JOHN BALABAN <http://www.johnbalaban.com/> is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including four volumes which together have won The Academy of American Poets’ Lamont prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award.  His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His latest books of poetry are Path, Crooked Path (Copper Canyon Press),  and Like Family, a chapbook from Red Dragonfly Press. His next book of poetry, Cibola, is due out from Copper Canyon Press in 2019.
In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, he is a translator of Vietnamese poetry, and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. In 1999, with two Vietnamese friends, he founded the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation (http://nomfoundation.org). In 2008, he was awarded a medal from the Ministry of Culture of Vietnam for his translations of poetry and his leadership in the restoration of the ancient text collection at the National Library.
Balaban is Professor Emeritus of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

SARAH HOWE <http://www.sarahhowepoetry.com> is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet,  A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. She has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 and 4.

Howe is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before taking up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at University College London. Previous honours include a Hawthornden Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry, as well as fellowships from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

Howe is a Lecturer in Poetry at King’s College London.