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  • Date: December 15
  • Time: 7:00pm - 10:00pm PT

A CELEBRATION OF POETRY & READERS featuring Dean Young and Deborah Landau

DSC_0101Featuring: Holiday book sale! Poetry reading by Deborah Landau, Dean Young, and others! Behind-the-scenes stories from the press! More!

Join Copper Canyon Press and Hugo House for a celebration of the gift that is given between the poem and the poetry reader. Meet Copper Canyon authors DEAN YOUNG and DEBORAH LANDAU and other surprise guests. Allow us to introduce you to books of poetry you may not have heard of, or reintroduce you to poets you’d at one time rejected as not your type. Let us play matchmaker as you search for the poem that will light you up, or the collection that will make the perfect gift for the reader on your list.

**THE EVENT IS FREE. RSVP REQUIRED.** The first 200 people to RSVP will receive a special gift at the door.


About Copper Canyon Press: We are a nonprofit publisher that believes that poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1972, the Press has published over 400 titles, including works by Nobel Laureates Pablo Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz, and Octavio Paz; Pulitzer Prize-winners W.S. Merwin, Theodore Roethke and Ted Kooser; National Book Award winners Lucille Clifton, Hayden Carruth, and Ruth Stone; and many more including Roger Reeves, Jericho Brown, Richard Siken, Deborah Landau, and Camille Rankine.


About the event:

7-8 p.m. | Meet the press. Doors and bar open. Receive your special gift at the door, and join Copper Canyon Press poets for a cash bar and snacks. Chat with Copper Canyon Press staff and friends and browse our holiday book sale before the crowd arrives.

8-9 p.m. | Meet the poems. Featured poet Deborah Landau, other Copper Canyon poets, and local guests will pay tribute to Copper Canyon authors past and present. After the reading, staff will play matchmaker, taking requests from those who seek a particular kind of poetry book; we’ll pull just the right volume for your personal collection or for someone on your holiday list.

9-10 p.m. | Stick around to talk with each other about what poetry means to you and how it betters your life. Describe the poem you wish someone would write. Sit and read a while. Fill up on hope. Get a book signed. Do some DIY gift-wrapping. Raise your glass to another good year in poetry.


About Deborah Landau

Deborah Landau is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The Uses of the Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and The Last Usable Hour, a Lannan Literary Selection published by Copper Canyon in 2011. Her first book, Orchidelirium, was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Tin House,Poetry, The New Yorker, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and featured on NPR’sAll Things Considered. Her poems have been widely anthologized in places such as The Best American Erotic Poems, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Viking 2015), Not for Mothers Only, (Fence Books), and Women’s Work: Modern Poets Writing in English.

She was educated at Stanford, Columbia, and Brown, where she was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. For many years she co-directed the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series and co-hosted the video interview program Open Book on Slate.com.

She teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, sons, and daughter.


About Dean Young

Poet Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA from Indiana University. Recognized as one of the most energetic, influential poets writing today, his numerous collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010). Upon presenting him with the Academy Award in Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted, “Dean Young’s poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch.” Young has also been awarded a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His poems have been featured in Best American Poetry numerous times.