Forrest Gander, reading and in conversation

Join us for this rare reading at The Poetry Center by poet-translator — and SF State alum — Forrest Gander, just in time for the debut of his new book of poetry, Be With (New Directions, 2018), his first book of poems since the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle nominee volume, Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 2011). Gander last read his work for The Poetry Center in 1996, so this is an overdue return. This event, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, is free and open to the public.

Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in Petaluma, California. Gander’s book Core Samples from the World, a meditation on the ways we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among his recent titles are the novel The Trace (New Directions, 2015), and two translations: Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems (Copper Canyon, 2016) and Alice, Iris, Red Horse: Selected Poems of Gozo Yoshimasu (editor, with multiple translators; New Directions, 2016). His first book of poems since 2011, Be With, is just out from New Directions. Gander is the recipient of grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting and United States Artists Foundations, he taught for many years as the AK Seaver Professor of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University.