Poets Naomi Shihab Nye (of Texas) and Cathy Song (of Hawai‘i), dear longtime friends, take the stage together for an evening immersed in the power of poetry as part of the Merwin Conservancy's Green Room environmental and literary salon series. The theme of the evening will explore poetry's role as an "antidote" to the chaos in the world around us.

 

Naomi Shihab Nye has spent 40 years traveling the country and the world leading writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. She was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity. Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). In January 2010, Nye was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. She is a laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Award for Children’s Literature, and in 2017, the American Library Association presented Naomi Shihab Nye with the 2018 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award. She is professor of creative writing - poetry at Texas State University.

 

Cathy Song was born and raised in Hawai‘i and is of Korean and Chinese descent. Her work draws on her rich Korean-Chinese ancestry as well as her experiences as an American and a woman. In poems that have been compared by critics to the muted tints of watercolor paintings, Song has consistently created a world rich with narrative and imagery that transcends her own ethnic and regional background. Song herself resists classification as an “Asian American” or “Hawaiian” writer, calling herself “a poet who happens to be Asian American.” Her first volume of poems, Picture Bride, won the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was also nominated for that year’s National Book Critics Circle Award. The volume’s success carried the young poet to national recognition, and other awards followed. Song is a noted teacher and leader of creative writing workshops through Hawaii’s “Poets in the Schools” program.

 

The presentation will be followed by a courtyard reception with dessert, beverages, book sales and live musical entertainment.  The evening is generously presented by FIM Group. All ticket sales benefit the non-profit Merwin Conservancy (www.merwinconservancy.org)