Rice Pudding Poetry

Award-Winning Poet David Rivard Featured in Rice Pudding Poetry Series

Poet David Rivard will be the featured poet in the upcoming Rice Pudding Poetry Series on Thursday evening, January 18. Together with a group of “community readers,” including Agnes Charlesworth, Tammi Truax, Alison Harville, Joan Beskenis, Alan Bing, and Lorna Perry, Rivard will read from his most recent collection of poems, Standoff, which has won the 2017 PEN/New England Award for Poetry. Guitarist Woody Allen will also perform.

Rivard is the author of five previous collections, including Wise Poison, winner of the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1996, and Torque, winner of the 1987 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His poems and essays appear in the American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and other magazines. In 2006, Rivard was awarded the Hardison Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, in recognition of both his writing and teaching. Among his other awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A former Poetry Editor at the Harvard Review, Rivard lives in Cambridge, with his wife and daughter, and teaches in the University of New Hampshire MFA Program in Writing.

The evening begins with live music, refreshments, and conversation at 6pm. The reading starts at 6:30pm. This event is free and open to the public, and seating in the upstairs library is limited. A book signing will follow the reading. Rice Public Library is located at 8 Wentworth Street in Kittery. Parking is available in the lots on either side of the Rice Building, or across the street in the Taylor Building lot. Call (207) 439-1553 for more information.