FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Musehouse Presents Its First Poetry Reading of the Season
Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, April 2, 2015
Musehouse, a supporter of writers and the literary arts in the Philadelphia area, will host its first poetry reading of the season at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 18, 2015, at Borrelli’s Chestnut Hill Gallery at 8117 Germantown Avenue in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia. Reading from their work will be poets Lisa Sewell and M. Nzadi Keita, both of whom live and work in the Philadelphia area.
Lisa Sewell’s fourth collection of poetry, Impossible Object, won The Word Works’ first annual Tenth Gate Prize in 2014. Series editor for the Tenth Gate, Leslie McGrath, has said of her work, “Lisa Sewell’s poems are shot through with an adhesive intelligence born of the accretion of craft, discernment, and engagement with the world.”
Ms. Sewell is co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics and of Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America. Her new work is appearing or forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and Mead. Ms. Sewall has been awarded a Leeway Foundation grant and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Villanova University.
- Nzadi Keita’s newest book, Brief Evidence of Heaven: Poems from the Life of Anna Murray Douglass (Whirlwind Press), imagines how free-born, illiterate Anna Murray Douglass saw the world as an independent woman, mother of five, abolitionist in her own right, and wife of Frederick Douglass.
Northwest Philadelphia born and raised, Ms. Keita is a writer, editor, scholar, and teacher. Numerous journals and anthologies have published her poems, and she has consulted for the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, among other organizations. Grants and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Ursinus College, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Leeway Foundation have supported her writing and community-based arts adventures. Ms. Keita is an associate professor of creative writing and American literature at Ursinus College.
About Musehouse. Founded in 2011 as a nonprofit center for the literary arts, Musehouse offers classes and workshops in poetry, prose, memoir, fiction, and nonfiction for aspiring and accomplished writers, as well as readings, panels, and open mic nights. Classes and other literary events are offered at various venues throughout the greater Philadelphia area. For further information, contact Founding Executive Director Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno at musehousecenter@gmail.com, by phone at 484-432-1792, or at Musehouse, P.O. Box 27268, Philadelphia, PA 19118. Visit Musehouse online at www.musehousecenter.com.