Concord Poetry at the Library Series presents With Verve and Vivid Wild Dreams: Sara Deniz Akant & Jennifer Funk
PLEASE REGISTER FOR A SEAT IN THE FORUM
Join us for an uplifting afternoon with regaled poets Concord-based Jennifer Funk and Turkish-American poet, educator, and performer Sara Deniz Akant for readings, Q & A about inspirations and the craft used in making these poems, book signings and refreshments.
SARA DENIZ AKANT’s Hyperphantasia (Rescue Press 2022) was a New York Times book of the year, a Boston Globe book of the year, and winner of the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. In its haunting 14-line poems (exploding the sonnet’s sonic and imaginative capabilities), Akant explores her Turkish-American ‘mixed minority’ life and attempts to reclaim the (often damning) myths that surround the culturally mixed, feminized body. Phanta, in her spiritual guide voice, early on asks ‘What will you do with your one wild, precious life?’ In ‘extremely vivid!’ poems of recurring, dialoging fragments from her past and present, Akant invokes a liberating journey for herself in this world and a return to transformative dust when flung ‘up to the stars’.
Akant is also the author of Babette (Rescue Press 2015), winner of the Black Box Poetry Prize, Parades (Omnidawn 2014), winner of the Chapbook Prize, and Latronic Strag (Persistent Editions 2014). With an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, Akant teaches poetry as Professor of the Practice at Tufts University and co-curates the Kan Yama Kan Reading Series in Brooklyn. Learn more at her website https://www.saradenizakant.com/
Jennifer Funk’s debut collection, Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy (Bull City 2023), is a sensuous investigation of the failings and thrills of trying to sate the insatiable. With stark emotive dynamism, Funk examines how domestication contends with wildness and what it costs the savage self to be cared for. Nina McLaughlin for The Boston Globe praises Funk’s “ shoulders-back head-up embrace of what the world has to offer, an exuberant sense of what’s here for us, as we puzzle out how to make a life that makes some semblance of sense, with integrity and kindness.”
A Concord-Carlisle High School adjustment counselor, Jennifer Funk is a native Californian trying to prove her mettle in New England. A graduate of Bennington College and of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, she has been a scholarship recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and The Frost Place and was honored with a Friends of Writers’ Levis Post-Graduate Stipend. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Four Way Review, Cimarron Review, Nashville Review, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry classes through the MetroWest Writers’ Guild. Find her at https://twitter.com/thisjenthatfunk?lang=en
This program is generously sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library.
