Featuring: Jericho Brown, Mark Bibbins, and Cate Marvin

Hosted by: Erin Belieu, Carl Phillips, Michael Wiegers, and John Reed

Poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1973, Copper Canyon Press has been publishing extraordinary poetry from around the world to engage the imaginations and intellects of readers. This 50th anniversary event celebrates the Press—and the many poets who have called it home—by way of a unique, new anthology: Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most. In tandem with its publication, this reading will feature award-winning poets (Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim, and New York Arts Foundation, among others) to read and discuss what they consider to be the best poems they’ve ever written. Offering an intimate portrait into the working mind of writers, this program will ask how writers manage the critic within, who or what they write for, and how we might rethink what literature gets remembered most.

Personal Best editors Erin Belieu and Carl Phillips will host the poets in their reading and conversation. Director of the New School Creative Writing Program, John Reed, will welcome guests, and Executive Editor at Copper Canyon Press, Michael Wiegers, will introduce the program with a survey of this fifty years of extraordinary poetry making.