Poetry at the Library: The Tonic of Wildness
Poetry at the Library will feature poets and naturalists Wendy Drexler and Susan Edwards Richmond on Sunday, December 17, 2017 at 3:00 p.m. in the Main Library Periodical Room. Sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, this free event is offered as part of Concord’s yearlong Thoreau Bicentennial. Wendy Drexler and Susan Edwards Richmond will read from their latest collections, followed by light refreshments and conversation about the making of poems that link their lives to what Thoreau calls the “inexhaustible vigor” of wildness in the natural world.
Wendy Drexler reads December 17 from her third collection, Before There Was Before, poems inspired by Thoreau’s reverence for the natural world. A three-time Pushcart-Prize nominee, Drexler is widely published, has been featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti, and is represented in several anthologies. A free-lance editor, she has been both a poetry editor and a cavity-nest monitor for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. She grew up in Denver, Colorado, was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, and now lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Susan Edwards Richmond reads December 17 from her fifth collection, Before We Were Birds. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies and have been featured on NPR’s Living on Earth. She is a founding editor of the regional journal, Wild Apples, a past President of The Robert Creeley Foundation, and serves as Poet-in-Residence at Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio in Harvard, Massachusetts. She has taught writing at several universities, including the University of California Davis where she earned her M.A. in Creative Writing. She lives in Acton with her husband.