Award-winning poet Andrea Cohen will be the celebrated author at this year’s Judith O’Connell Hoyer ‘65 Poetry Reading on March 7.
Cohen will read from her poems in the Sheehan Hall Multi-Purpose Room on Thursday, beginning at 1 p.m., followed by Q&A. Students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members are welcome to attend the event. The poetry series is sponsored by Worcester State alumna Judith O’Connell Hoyer ’65, and over the years it has brought more than a dozen nationally recognized and emerging poets to campus.
Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and Glimmer Train. Her newest book of poems, The Sorrow Apartments, is just out with Four Way Books. 2024. David Orr, writing in The New York Times about the best poetry books of 2019, described Cohen’s poems as “acutely literary writing that wears its literariness lightly enough for long journeys to unfamiliar places.”
Professor of English Heather Treseler noted, “Andrea Cohen’s poems, equal parts heart and wit, delve into the hard truths and moments of human warmth that sustain and surprise us. When you open one of her books, you open a set of trapdoors, and each of her eight books leaves the reader changed–wiser, perhaps, and certainly more humane.”
Cohen has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train’s Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at MacDowell. She has taught at The University of Iowa, Emerson College, UMASS-Boston, Boston University, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Merrimack College, where she was the founding director of the Writers’ House. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA, and is teaching at Boston University in the spring of 2024.
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