Decorated Poet Dora Malech to perform poetry reading, give Q&A at SMU
Dora Malech, a widely published and highly decorated poet currently on faculty at Johns Hopkins University, will perform a poetry reading and engage in a question-and-answer session on Tuesday, March 15.
“Dora Malech is one of the most exciting young poets writing in America,” says SMU Associate Professor of English Greg Brownderville. “She’s only in her mid 30s and already in a tenure track position for a prestigious seminar at John Hopkins University. She’s won virtually every award a poet of her age could conceivably win and she’s a very good performer of her poetry. She also has a delightful personality that will come through during the banter between reading her poems.”
Malech has published two collections of poetry, Shore Ordered Ocean, in 2009, and Say so, in 2011. Her poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Poetry and Best New Poets, and she’s received a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Frederick M. Clapp Poetry Writing Fellowship from Yale, among other honors.
“She writes poems in which there is this big heart yearning for contact or connection in a modern environment where connection is hard to come by,” Brownderville says. “She has a poem in which a woman is in a train station secretly saying a prayer within the privacy of her own mind, blessing every man she sees in the station. And you get the sense the speaker would love to meet the people she’s praying for, but she’s in a train station and everyone is going to another destination and nobody knows anybody. So there’s this transitory anonymity that everybody is having to deal with as a condition of their lives.”
The event is free and open to the public.