About this Event
Poetry in Dangerous Times: Two Women, Two Worlds. A Dialogue With Susan Sherman and Demetria Martínez
In this presentation, Demetria Martínez and Susan Sherman, one a Chicana poet from New Mexico, the other a Jewish New Yorker, both lifelong writers and activists, will share through dialogue and poems their different backgrounds, their origins in different eras—Sherman in the Sixties and Martínez in the Sanctuary Movement in the Eighties—and their work in their respective communities. Believing as they do that poetry at its best uses words that can reach below the surface of empty rhetoric to communicate on a deeper level, they consider it instrumental to building community. This program will include a Q&A with the audience.
About
SUSAN SHERMAN
Poet, playwright, essayist, a founding editor of IKON magazine, Susan Sherman has had twelve plays produced off-off Broadway including an adaptation from Spanish of Pepe Carril's, Shango de Ima (Doubleday, 1971), which won eleven AUDELCO awards for a 1996 Nuyorican Poets Café revival. Publications include seven collections of poetry; a critically acclaimed memoir, America’s Child: A Woman’s Journey through the Radical Sixties (Curbstone Press, 2007) which chronicled her activist and literary life in the 1960s including the Fifth Street Women’s Building Action, the Cuban Cultural Congress of Havana (1968), and the opening of IKONbooks, a cultural and activist center. Her poetry collection The Light that Puts an End to Dreams (Wings Press, 2012) was a finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Other awards include a 2018 Acker Author’s Award, a NYFA Creative Nonfiction Literature fellowship, a NYFA Poetry fellowship, and a Puffin Foundation Grant.
DEMETRIA MARTINEZ
Writer, poet and activist, Demetria Martinez was born and raised in Albuquerque. She earned a BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from Princeton University. She went on to pursue journalism, covering religion for the Albuquerque Journal and writing for the National Catholic Reporter, where she was a national news editor and a columnist. Her widely translated novel, Mother Tongue (Ballantine), set during the Sanctuary Movement, won a Western States Book Award and received critical acclaim from Publisher’s Weekly, The Washington Post Book World, The Nation and Kirkus Reviews. The novel was inspired by her 1987 indictment on charges of conspiracy in connection with allegedly transporting Central American refugees into the United States. The U.S. government attempted to use her poem, Nativity: For Two Salvadoran Women, 1986-1987, against her. A jury acquitted her on First Amendment grounds.
Praise for Poetry in Dangerous Times
“These are dangerous times indeed. In such times, again and again, we turn to poets like Demetria Martínez and Susan Sherman. Here are two poets who have faced dangerous times before, always with courage, patience, compassion, and eloquence. In the face of danger, they not only speak, but sing. The proof is in the pages of this unique and necessary collection, two women from two different worlds showing us our common ground, the path we must walk, illuminated by the fire in these poems, to find our common humanity, to find the way home.”
—Martín Espada, author of the National Book Award-winning Floaters and the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Republic of Poetry
“Meet two women from two worlds: Demetria Martínez, a Chicana rooted in family history passed on, and Susan Sherman, a Jewish woman self-exiled from a family who wanted to forget. Martínez whispers poems down the page in images so tender it feels like being let in on a secret: ‘Dreams opening/Like the fist of an infant.’ Sherman’s is a seasoned philosopher’s voice simmered in ‘the usual detritus of Manhattan nights’ resulting in a rich stew of insights to be savored, even better the second time around. When strong/queer/activist poets craft a gift this magnificent, take it.”
—Mary Oishi, Albuquerque Poet Laureate Emerita and author of Sidewalk Cruiseship
“What are some poets doing when they're not writing poetry? As Poetry in Dangerous Times: Two Women, Two Worlds reveals, they are trying to repair the world.… Free of didacticism and slogans, these poems address a wide range of themes and passions, always deeply moving as they remind us to struggle for social justice but also to rest and remember the people and things we love and struggle for; they are enriching and engaging.”
—Irena Klepfisz, author of Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems 1971–2021
Event venue & nearby stays
Hudson Park Library, 66 Leroy Street, New York, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.