Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong(a)yahoo.com
City ArtPresents Robin Becker and Natasha Sajé
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday November 6th 7:00—9:00 P.M.
WritersRobin Becker and Natasha Sajé will read from their work November 6that 7:00 P.M. at the Salt Lake City Public Library as part of the City ArtReading Series.
Poet Robin Becker was born inPhiladelphia and earned a BA and MA at Boston University. She taught for manyyears at the MIT before returning to Pennsylvania in 1994, where she is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State. Becker’s manycollections of poetry include Personal Effects (1977); Backtalk (1982); Giacometti’s Dog (1990); All-American Girl (1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award; The Horse Fair (2000); Domain of Perfect Affection (2006); Tiger Heron (2014); and The Black Bear Inside Me (2018). Becker’srange of subjects has been described as a “vibrant miscellany.” Her poemsreflect her Russian-Jewish heritage and queer identity, her interest in arthistory and visual art, the experience of growing up in 1950s America, and thelegacy of the 1960s. In The Horse Fair, her subjects range from the painter Rosa Bonheur to theTorah and personal tragedies. Poet Kathleen Aguero has said that Becker’s poemsare “richly populated by friends, lovers, family” as they “chronicle a searchfor community.”Becker’s work has appeared widely in magazines andjournals, including American Poetry Review, the Boston Globe, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is acontributing editor to Ploughshares and poetry editor for the Women’s Review of Books, where she writes a column called “Field Notes.” Beckeralso teaches workshops at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. She has wonfellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation,and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 she was honored with PennState's George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, and she served asPenn State Laureate in 2010-11.
Poet NatashaSajé is the author of the collections Vivarium (Tupelo 2014), RedUnder the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994), and Bend (Tupelo Press, 2004),and many essays. Her work has been honored with the Robert Winner and Alice Faydi Castagnola Awards, a Fulbright fellowship, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize,and the Utah Book Award. Saje’s poems, reviews,and essays have appeared in many periodicals, including The Henry James Review, American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, KenyonReview, New Republic, Poetry, Paris Review, Gettysburg Review,Ploughshares, Rhino, Shenandoah, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The New York Times. Sajé is a professor of English atWestminster College in Salt Lake City, and has been teaching in the VermontCollege M.F.A. in Writing program since 1996.
The event is free and open to thepublic. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt LakeCity Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audiencedonations.
Joel Long
