Zoom Reading: Rebecca Foust & Patricia Smith

Rebecca Foust’s six books include The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, winner of the 2018 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Award and released in October 2019, and Paradise Drive, winner of the Press 53 Award for Poetry and reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere. Recognitions include the CP Cavafy and James Hearst Prizes (Poetry), the Lascaux Review and American Literary Review Prizes (Fiction), the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, Sewanee, and West Chester Poetry Conference. Foust was the 2017-19 Marin County Poet Laureate and works as Poetry Editor for Women’s Voices for Change, an assistant Editor for Narrative Magazine, and producer of a local TV show about poetry in Marin County, Rising Voices.

Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (2017), winner of an NAACP Image Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press. Smith collaborated with the photographer Michael Abramson on the book Gotta Go Gotta Flow: Life, Love, and Lust on Chicago’s South Side From the Seventies (2015). Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, the Paris Review, the New York Times, TriQuarterly, Tin House, the Washington Post, and in both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, a 2012 fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, recipient of a Lannan fellowship and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.