FANWOOD – The Carriage House Poetry Series in Fanwood has invited the public to attend a poetry reading by Gerald Stern and Anne Marie Macari on Tuesday, May 19. The free poetry performances will begin promptly at 8 p.m. in the Patricia Kuran Arts Center on Watson Road, off North Martine Avenue, adjacent to Fanwood Borough Hall. For those using GPS for directions, the address to use is 75 N. Martine Ave.
Stern is one of America’s best known and most loved poets. Born in 1925, his career has included the National Book Award, the Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from the American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
In 2005, Stern was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. For many years a teacher at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, he now lives in Lambertville.
Stern was the first poet to read in the Carriage House Poetry Series when it began in December of 1998.
Reading with Stern will be Macari, whose first book won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry. She also is a winner of Five Points’ James Dickey Prize for Poetry.
Macari has published widely in journals, including The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Bloomsbury Review, and Shenandoah. A graduate of Oberlin College, she holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence.
Macari founded and teaches in the Drew University MFA Program for Poetry & Poetry in Translation and also has taught on the faculty of the Prague Summer Seminars.
The Carriage House Poetry Series is currently in its 17th year at the Kuran Arts Center, a historic Gothic Revival structure that was once a 19th century carriage house, hence the name of the series. The reading is free and open to the public.
For more information call 908-889-7223 or 908-889-5298. For online directions and information, visit www.carriagehousepoetryseries.