Brenda Shaughnessy
Harman Writer-In-Residence, Spring 2014
(Photo by Sylvia Plachy)
The author of three collections of poetry, most recently Our Andromeda, Brenda Shaughnessy was a finalist for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her other books are Human Dark with Sugar, winner of the James Laughlin Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harpers, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and elsewhere.
Shaughnessy is a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and is currently on leave from Rutgers University at Newark where she is an assistant professor of English, teaching in the MFA Program. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, son, and daughter.
Miracles, from Our Andromeda
I spent the whole day
crying and writing, until
they became the same,
as when the planet covers the sun
with all its might and still
I can see it; or when one dead
body gives its heart
to a name on a list. A match.
A light. Sailing a signal
flare behind me for another to find.
A scratch on the page
is a supernatural act, one twisting
fire out of water, blood out of stone.
We can read us. We are not alone.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014, 5:45 pm
A reading and conversation with Brenda Shaughnessy in the Asriel and Marie Rackow Conference Room, Room 750, Information and Technology Building, Baruch College; co-sponsored by Poets & Writers.
Brenda Shaughnessy reading selections of her poetry.
Ms. Shaughnessy with one of her students.
Ms. Shaughnessy with the past and present Harman directors, Prof. Roslyn Bernstein (right) and Prof. Bridgett Davis (left).
*Photo credit: Glenda Hydler