Join us for an in-person afternoon with award-winning poets Jordan Escobar and Adam Scheffler who will read and engage in a Q & A about their inspirations and craft.

PLEASE REGISTER BELOW FOR A SEAT IN THE FORUM

Jordan Escobar reads from Men With the Throats of Birds to be published this spring as one of the choices for the 2023 CutBank Press Chapbook Series. “In [its] poems we enter the consciousness of the hardscrabble outdoors workers whose bodies suffer into a philosophy of special knowing,” praises poet and essayist Kevin Clark. “I don’t know another poet whose work is more convincingly imbued with the loam and rock of earth. Threnodic, musical, intimate, mysterious, and accessible, Escobar has produced one of the truly distinguished books of the year.”

A writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, Escobar is a 2022 Djanikian Scholar in Poetry. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and his work has been recognized by the Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture. His work has been published in many journals including Zone 3, Booth, Colorado Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.

Originally from Central California, he has worked as a grape grower, almond rancher, beekeeper, longshoreman, goat herder, handyman, oyster farmer, horse wrangler and zookeeper. He lives in Jamaica Plain and currently divides his time teaching at Emerson College and Babson College and working as a professional beekeeper. https://jordanescobarpoetry.com/

Adam Scheffler reads from his second poetry collection, Heartworm (January, 2023), the 2021 Moon City Press Award Winner. “Scheffler is a maestro of anaphora,” writes poet Denise Duhamel, “as he navigates our difficult ‘now’ with poems about climate change, the decline of employee unions, and the disconnect of social media, just for starters. Scheffler is wise, humane, capable of looking at the absurd and terrifying, while often giving his readers an empathetic chuckle. Heartworm uses the overall metaphor of this disease, which affects dogs but can be treated and prevented with the intervention of human care. Like an earworm, the poems in Heartworm will burrow into your brain/heart/nervous system—except, unlike an earworm, you’ll be grateful for their company!”

Scheffler is also the author of A Dog’s Life, winner of the 2016 Jacar Press Poetry Contest Award. He grew up in California, received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his PhD in English from Harvard. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Verse Daily, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and many other venues. He lives in Cambridge and teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program. http://adamscheffler.com/

This event is sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library.