Poetry Reading with Sarah Browning and Lauren Camp
In her Dorset Prize-winning new collection, Lauren Camp explores the lives of a first-generation Arab-American girl and her Jewish-Iraqi parent. One Hundred Hungers tells overlapping stories of food and ritual, immigration and adaptation, evoking her father’s boyhood in Baghdad in the 1940s at a time when tensions began to emerge along ethnic and religious lines. She also draws upon memories of Sabbath dinners in her grandparents’ new home in America to reveal how family culture persists.
Lauren Camp is the author of three books, most recently One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), winner of the Dorset Prize. Her poems have been included in New England Review, Poetry International, RHINO, Slice, The Seattle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal and as a Poem-a-Day forPoets.org. Other literary honors include the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize, the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, and a Black Earth Institute Fellowship. She is the producer/host of “Audio Saucepan” on Santa Fe Public Radio, a program that interweaves music with contemporary poetry. www.laurencamp.com
Browning explores the meaning of political activism and personal responsiblity in a time of war, while mapping the capital city—its changes, its history, its beautiful variety. Martín Espada said: "This poet has the courage to say what needs to be said, from the personal to the political (and often the two are intertwined). Sarah Browning takes on the hard questions—war, race, urban poverty—and never loses her cool. Her voice is tough and funny and smart."
Sarah Browning is co-founder and Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation & Witness and an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden and Killing Summer (forthcoming, 2017) and co-editor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology, she is the recipient of artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, a Creative Communities Initiative grant, and the People Before Profits Poetry Prize. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and POETRY magazine. Since 2006, Browning has co-hosted the Sunday Kind of Love poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC.