Hillary Gravendyk Memorial Reading with Rae Armantrout, Ryan E. Burt, Jeanne Heuving, Rebecca Hoogs & Others

Join us for a special memorial reading from late poet Hillary Gravendyk’s posthumous collection,The Soluble Hour (Omnidawn).

Poets Rae Armantrout, Ryan E. Burt, Jeanne Heuving, and others will read from Gravendyk’s work. Hosted by Rebecca Hoogs with books for sale from Open Books: A Poem Emporium.

“Like some latter-day Keats [Gravendyk] teaches us both ‘the down-fall’ and ‘the jubilation’ inherent in the fact that we are ‘forever bound to our bodies,’ ‘which flower and fail.’ These are poems of relation…they were in their composition already aware of the unfathomable distance they would ultimately have to cross.” — Jessica Fisher

“The lyric here is both cry and love song. These deeply felt and precise poems cry for the beloved, knowing the beloved will soon be bereft.” –Julie Carr

“These poems are not retrained by the illness of a poet taken from us too soon, but rather are energized by an abiding interest in the special kind of presence, of the embodied phenomenology that illness makes possible.” —Joseph Jeon

Hillary Anne Gravendyk was born in Los Angeles, California on March 1, 1979, and grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley of Washington State, near the town of Carnation. She attended Tulane and the University of Washington and went on to get a doctorate in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, her chapbook The Naturalist came out from Achiote Press and in 2010, her book Harm, published by Omnidawn, was a finalist for the California Writer’s Exchange Award. In 2009, she was hired to teach 20th Century poetry at Pomona College in Claremont, California. After moving to Oakland in 2003 with her husband Benjamin Burrill, Hillary lived out most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area and Claremont.