Poetry Reading and Literary Drink Fest – celebrating National Poetry Month!
The Betsy’s annual Under the Influence event with O, Miami
featuring Poets Campbell McGrath, Ruth Behar and Jacob Saenz
Sunday, April 15 in The Galley @ The Betsy Hotel – 7 PM (Literary Drink Tasting immediately following).
ABOUT THE POETS
Campbell McGrath was born in Chicago in 1962 and grew up in Washington, D.C. He received his BA in English language and literature from the University of Chicago and his MFA in creative writing from Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of ten collections of poetry, including XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century (Ecco Press, 2016), In The Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco Press, 2012), Shannon (Ecco Press, 2009), and Seven Notebooks (Ecco Press, 2007). His third book, Spring Comes to Chicago (Ecco Press, 1996), won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. McGrath’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. About his work, David Biespiel writes, “McGrath has already developed a signature style that is brutally expansive, slangy, and rife with high- and low-toned jargon. His ‘promethean eruptions’ are at once explosive, swaggering, opportunistic, and flip. … a brilliant bubbling forth of a comic and serious intelligence.” McGrath lives in Miami and teaches creative writing at Florida International University.
Ruth Behar is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on folk religion, women’s lives, and personal narration in historical and contemporary Cuba, Mexico, and Spain. Her first book, The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa Maria del Monte (1986; expanded paperback edition, 1991), uses a variety of past and present narratives to tell a multilayered story of how one village negotiated its relation to the past in the wake of social transformations that removed people from the land during the late-Franco years. She is the author of A Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (1993), which combines a life history account with reflections on autobiographical truth. In The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (1996), Behar explores themes of memory, identity, and emigration. Behar is also the editor of Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba (1995) and co-editor of Women Writing Culture (1995). She is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, and is also affiliated with programs in Women’s Studies, Latin American Studies, and Latino Studies at the University of Michigan. Behar received a B.A. (1977) from Wesleyan University, and an M.A. (1980) and Ph.D. (1983) from Princeton University.
Poet and editor Jacob Saenz was born in Chicago and raised in Cicero, Illinois. He earned a BA in creative writing from Columbia College in Chicago. Saenz has been an editor at Columbia Poetry Review and an associate editor at RHINO. He works as an acquisitions assistant at the Columbia College library and has read his poetry at a number of Chicago venues. A CantoMundo fellow, he has also been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship.
