The McEver Poetry Event

The Cypress Theater: Directions & Information

The Cypress Theater (https://studentcenter.gatech.edu/student-center/rooms/cypress) will be Poetry@Tech's new home, after over two decades in the Kress Auditorium at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking.

With space for an audience of 165 people, and a large banqueting area, the Cypress Theater will be a wonderful venue for our future readings.

The Cypress theater is located on the first level, at the southeast corner of Georgia Tech's newly-renovated John Lewis Student Center building (https://studentcenter.gatech.edu/student-center), located at 350 Ferst Dr NW, Atlanta, GA 30332.

Please see the maps below for directions to the Student Center and to the Cypress Theater.

https://studentcenter.gatech.edu/student-center

Patricia Smith is the award-winning author of eight critically-acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Triquarterly Books, 2023), Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (CityFiles Press, 2015). Writing about Incendiary Art, Publisher’s Weekly praised Smith’s “razor-sharp linguistic sensibilities that give her scenes a cinematic flair and her lines a momentum that buoys their emotional weight.”

Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House, and anthologized in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. Smith also co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017), and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir (Akashic Books, 2012).

Smith is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, an Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Detailed Bio at Poetry@Tech

Poet's Website

@pswordwoman

Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, language artist, and AI researcher, exploring the intersection of text and technology. She is known for her pioneering experiments with generative literature and blockchain poetics. 

In late 2021, Stiles released her debut book, Technelegy, co-authored by a custom AI-powered text generator; the book probes how technology has made us more and more human over time, and explores both the exhilaration and danger of our intimate relationship with the digital. A co-founder of theVERSEverse, a web3 gallery and writers' collective, Stiles showcases her multidimensional, transdisciplinary pieces in physical and virtual exhibitions worldwide. 

A Harvard and Oxford graduate, Stiles resides near New York City.

Bio at Poetry@Tech

Poet's Website

@sashastiles

H. Bruce McEver started writing in workshops in New York City with Hugh Seidman, Pearl London, Katha Pollitt, Brooks Haxton, David Lehman, and J.D. McClatchy. His most recent full-length poetry collections include Like Lesser Gods (C&R Press, 2017), and Scaring Up the Morning (C&R Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Westview, The Berkshire Review, The Cortland Review, The Connecticut River Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and The Atlanta Review. Bruce is on the board of The Poet’s House in New York.

Bruce received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and an M.T.S. (Religion and Literature) from Harvard Divinity School. An investment banker and the Chairman of Berkshire Capital Securities LLC, a firm he founded in 1983.  Bruce is also a Georgia Tech BIE alumnus, and was a Lieutenant, USN, on the staff of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, He founded Berkshire Capital Corporation in l983. A member of the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, Bruce is a dedicated conservationist. He works in New York City and lives in Salisbury, Connecticut on Utopia Farm.

Bio at Poetry@Tech

Patricia Smith

Hip-Hop Ghazal

(from Poetry, Jul/Aug 2007)      
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49642/hip-hop-ghazal

Sasha Stiles

HI-RESOLUTION

(from the Poet's Website)      
Commissioned by One Times Square/Times Square Arts and Studio As We Are for Virtual New Year's Eve, December 2020
https://www.sashastiles.com/art

Bruce McEver

Many Paths

        ...that very Spirit intercedes with signs too deep for words.
        --Romans 8:24

Christmas morning, below zero,
the day after she died,
my breath freezing, I am dazed
as I walk into the barnyard,
to recall our happiness with the animals there.
Sagging cedar gates close behind me.
My quarter horse, Cinnamon,
spots me over a hundred yards distant
and begins his long lope. Soon,
his soft nuzzle is rubbing my face, warm,
then her horse and soon, the whole herd,
joined by the goats, and the dog.
They ring me in a circle of compassion.
Touched, yet unbelieving, I look up
into a blinding, cold sun and feel a release—
an energy courses
the length of my body,
and says again, then again:
There are many paths.
Nothing has ever been so clear.

(from The Cortland Review)
https://archive.cortlandreview.org/issue/56/mcever.php

As always, A Cappella Books, Atlanta’s oldest independent bookstore will be our official book sales partner for this event. 

Look for A Cappella's table outside the Cypress Theater, where you can buy books by our wonderful featured poets. We hope you’ll get a copy (or three) of their books. 

You can also order at the following links:

Recent Books

• Sasha Stiles, Technelegy (Eyewear Publishing, 2022)
• Bruce McEver, Many Paths: A Memoir (C&R Press, 2022)
• Bruce McEver, Like Lesser Gods (C&R Press, 2017)
• Bruce McEver, Scaring Up the Morning (C&R Press, 2013)
• Patricia Smith, Unshuttered (TriQuarterly, 2023)
• Patricia Smith, Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly, 2017)
• Patricia Smith, Gotta Go Gotta Flow (CityFiles Press, 2015)

• Patricia Smith, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press Press, 2012)