"Leaning Toward Light" Poetry Reading

Join us for an evening of poetry and music with Tess Taylor, along with local contributors to the poetry collection, Leaning Toward Light: Anna V.Q. Ross, Brian Simoneau, January Gill O’Neil, Kirun Kapur, and Stephanie Burt, who will share their work and their love of things garden and poetry-related. Musical guest is Naomi Westwater. Book signing facilitated by Papercuts to follow.

Caring for plants (much like reading a good poem) brings comfort, solace, and joy to many—offering an outlet in difficult times to slow down and steward growth. In Leaning toward Light, acclaimed poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor brings together a diverse range of contemporary voices to offer poems that celebrate that joyful connection to the natural world. Several of the most well-known contemporary writers, as well as some of poetry’s exciting rising stars, contribute to this collection.

Suggested arrival time is 5:30 PM. Registration via this Eventbrite page is highly recommended for planning purposes. Seating in the McKim Building Courtyard is first come, first served.

The rain location is the Rabb Lecture Hall on the Lower Level of the Boylston Street Building of the Central Library in Copley Square.

Tess Taylor, an avid gardener, is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry including Work & Days, a contemporary farm journal, which was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. She has served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times. Taylor lives in El Cerrito, California and can be found at www.tess-taylor.com.

Anna V. Q. Ross’s latest book, Flutter, Kick (Red Hen Press), won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. She is a Fulbright Scholar, a Mass Cultural Council fellow, and poetry editor for Salamander. Her work appears in The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, and The Nation, and she teaches at Tufts University and through the Emerson Prison Initiative.

Brian Simoneau is the author of the poetry collections No Small Comfort (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and River Bound (C&R Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Salamander, Waxwing, and other journals. Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, he lives near Boston with his family.

January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Glitter Road (forthcoming, 2024) Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she was the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. She currently serves as the 2022-2023 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writers Programs (AWP).

Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015). Her second collection, Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Julie Suk Award and the Massachusetts Book Award. She serves as editor at the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program.

Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University and the author of several previous books of poetry and literary criticism, among them Advice from the Lights, Belmont and Close Calls with Nonsense, as well as The Poem Is You. Their most recent collection is We Are Mermaids.

Naomi Westwater (they/she) is a queer, Black-multiracial singer-songwriter from Massachusetts. Their work combines folk music, poetry, and spirituality. Their hope is that through ritual and storytelling they can aid nature in the end of capitalism and the return of community, creativity, and collective joy. 

Naomi holds a Master of Music in Contemporary Performance and Production from Berklee College of Music and she is a part of The Club Passim Folk Collective. She was nominated for a 2021 and 2022 Boston Music Award for best singer-songwriter, and has been featured in Under The Radar, WBUR, Vanyaland, WGBH, Allston Pudding, and The Bluegrass Situation.

In addition to music, Naomi is on faculty at Not Sorry Productions and leads the Boston Chapter of Beats By Girlz.

This program is presented by the Boston Public Library in partnership with the City of Boston Office of Arts and Culture.

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