Darien Library is pleased to present Stephen Haven as our 2018 Poet’s Voice poet. He is the author of The Last Sacred Place in North America, winner of the New American Prize.

He has published two previous collections of poetry, Dust and Bread, for which he was named 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year, and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks. He is also author of the memoir The River Lock: One Boy’s Life Along the Mohawk.

Haven’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Salmagundi, Image, Blackbird, Guernica, and in many other journals.

He has received fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and at the Djerassi Foundation, five Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council, and two year-long Fulbright Foundation grants to teach in Beijing Universities. Haven is Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.

Refreshments will be served.

About The Poet’s Voice

The Poet’s Voice — the series that has brought Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Prize recipients, and Poets Laureate to local public libraries — presents two readings for 2018, at Darien Library and Greenwich Library.

The series, traditionally held at Fairfield County libraries, is supported by the Horace E. Manacher Poetry Fund. The Manacher family of Greenwich has supported these readings since 1977 in an effort to bring notable poets to the community.

The readings have included Pulitzer Prize winners James Merrill, Mark Strand, Howard Nemerov, and Jorie Graham. Nobel Prize winners Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott have also appeared over the years, as have U.S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003) Billy Collins and Connecticut Poet Laureate (2001-2006) Marilyn Nelson. Dana Gioia, a reader in the series and former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts labeled the series “a model for poetry readings.”