Poet Spotlight — Bob Brodsky

Spotlight courtesy of the NLF Website:

Bob Brodsky will be a speaker at this year’s Newburyport Literary Festival in Newburyport, MA. 

Bob has pursued parallel interests in issues of justice, visual harmonies, and community vitality. As a member of the clergy he wrestled with the opportunities of the 1960s, as a filmmaker and television technician he works to support film artists and archivists, and as an amateur singer and writer he does what he can to prompt appreciation of varied approaches to familiar themes. In 2005 he completed a memoir, Marching Bands Make Me Cry , to honor five individuals who have greatly informed him. And as a lucky one who had the opportunity to sit with Robert Frost, Richard Niebuhr, and Jean Rouch, he is glad to lend his voice to the Polyphony.

Mundo y Palabra / The World and the Word

From the NLF Website:

The 2008 Newburyport Literary Festival is pleased to announce that the honoree for the 2008 festival is poet and translator Rhina P. Espaillat.

The festival will be held April 25-27, 2008

Renowned poets Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; X. J. Kennedy, author of ten poetry collections and widely known for his anthologies, translations, light verse, and beloved works for children; and essayist and poet Lewis Turco will join the celebration of Espaillat at the Festival.

About Rhina P. Espaillat

Rhina Espaillat has published ten collections of her work including Playing at Stillness (Truman State University Press, 2005), a bilingual collection of poems and essays titled Agua de dos rios, published under the auspices of the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture (Editora Buho, 2006); and a bilingual collection of her short stories, E olor de la memoria/The Scent of Memory (Editora CEDIBIL, 2007). Her achievements have won her numerous awards including the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; the Richard Wilbur Award; the Nemerov Prize; three yearly prizes from the Poetry Society of America; the Barbara Bradley Award and the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club.

A Word from Rhina P. Espaillat

The purpose of the Newburyport Literary Festival is a simple one: celebration. To be precise, it’s a celebration of language-the word-whether it’s spoken, sung, chanted, declaimed, inscribed in stone, written on papyrus, transmitted electronically, or set down on the printed page. The word, in any and all of its guises, is worth celebrating, because no other human invention has done more to give us access to the world we live in. The word allows to name, define, describe, and preserve what we encounter of the world; the word allows us to bridge time by studying the past through its writings and leaving our own record for the future; the word allows us to communicate across borders, and-thanks to translation-even across the borders between languages. The word, finally, allows us to distill, analyze, embellish, and invent human experience to create literature.

It’s hard to imagine what our understanding of the world would be like without the word or what we would be like without the words we gather into books. The truth is that those books also gather us-our hopes and foibles and dreams-into images of what we are and what we hope to make of ourselves.

Come celebrate with us – the world and the word – mundo y palabra – an indissoluble partnership! – Rhina Espaillat

Click here for Rhina’s bio and other information .