The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library invite you to celebrate National Poetry Month with acclaimed poets Kathleen Aguero and José Angel Araguz who will read from their newest collections and engage in a Q & A about the creative process and the role of poetry in their lives.
Kathleen Aguero engages us with her nuanced humor and striking metaphors in her sixth collection, World Happiness Index (Tiger Bark Press, 2022), a book inspired by an annual report in which surveys from people around the world contain rankings of each country’s happiness. Aguero’s topics are relationships – with her grandchildren, her father, and those in the public eye whom she has encountered in memorable experiences. Through self-portraits and reflective poems touching on the communal aspects that address our interconnected world, Aguero brings the reader to the intersection of the personal and the political. “This compelling collection speaks with firm tenderness to the inner-struggle of human agency that we all feel, caught between our resoluteness and our limitations, especially during these trying times,” praises Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet and author of How to Love a County.
Born and raised in Corpus Christi, TX, José Angel Araguz exercises lyrical dexterity and an intensely empathic imagination in his fifth book, Rotura (Black Lawrence Press, 2022), poems about life circa the pre-/post 2016 election – a time that led the poet to reexamine his divided identity and engage in fresh appraisals of personal and family history. In its praise, Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus, writes “Rotura is a moving book where the voice undulates dark and soul-filled along cracked borders, rising boundaries and worn “brown gods” along the routes, grasping at fading shimmers of truth, family, longings and stark existence. Direct and tender, knowing and lilting, shifting and wandering—in all this “rotura” rupture there is warmth, love, suffering and purpose for the long haul ahead. A magnificent, profound and necessary text from the Latinx Renaissance.”
Poet Bios
Aguero’s previous collections include After That, Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth, Daughter Of, The Real Weather, and Thirsty Day. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, and The Cincinnati Review. She is co-editor of three collections of multicultural literature for U of Georgia Press: A Gift of Tongues, An Ear to the Ground, and Daily Fare. Her honors include the 2012 Firman Houghton Award from the New England Poetry Club and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Elgin-Cox Foundation. In addition to teaching in the Solstice MFA program at Pine Manor College, she teaches in Changing Lives through Literature, an alternative sentencing program, and conducts Creative Writing for Caregivers Workshops in community and institutional settings. She is a consulting editor in poetry for The Kenyon Review.
Araguz is also the author of Everything We Think We Hear, Small Fires, Until We Are Level Again, and An Empty Pot’s Darkness. His poems, creative nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, New South, Poetry International, and The Bind. Born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and composes erasure poems on the Instagram account @poetryamano. A faculty member in Pine Manor College’s Solstice Low-Residency MFA program, he also reads for the journal Right Hand Pointing. With an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, Araguz is an Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston where he also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander Magazine.
This is a live-only virtual program. Live closed captioning will be available.
The Series is sponsored by Friends of the Concord Free Public Library
