MARLBORO — Marlboro College welcomes back alumna and celebrated poet Sophie Cabot Black '80 for a reading of her work. She will be presenting on Thursday, Feb. 27, at 7 p.m., in Apple Tree, and the event is free and open to the public.
Black's latest collection, The Exchange (2013), received critical acclaim, including a starred review in Publisher's Weekly, and on All Things Considered was reviewed as “the book for you.”
She has two previous poetry collections, The Misunderstanding of Nature, which received the Poetry Society of America's First Book Award, and The Descent, which received the 2005 Connecticut Book Award.
“Black is a passionate and breathlessly forceful writer,” said Poetry magazine. “Hers are poems which merge the erotic and spiritual with an adamance as old as the Song of Songs.” Boston Review added, “...what amazes the reader is that such honed writing can speak with such emotional immediacy.”
Billy Collins in The New York Times has said: “...she's concocted a way of speaking in poetry that's very fresh and daring.”
Black's poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry. She has been awarded several fellowships, including at the Macdowell Colony and the Radcliffe Institute, and appears at national literary festivals such as the Los Angeles Times Book Festival and the Dodge Poetry Festival.
She has taught at Rutgers, The New School, Columbia University, the 92nd Street Y in New York, and currently teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in the summers.