Poetry

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her most recent books are two poetry collections, Girl after Girl after Girl (Louisiana State University Press, 2017) and Of Marriage (Alice James Books, 2018).

Geoffrey Brock is the author of two collections of poems (Weighing Light and Voices Bright Flags), the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of numerous volumes of Italian poetry and prose. His poems appear in journals such as Poetry, Paris Review, and Yale Review, as well as in the Best American and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

James Arthur's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. His first book, Charms Against Lightning, was published in 2012 by Copper Canyon Press.

From Danielle Legros George's fellowship report:

In the video, Sasanov discusses her residency at AAS and reads her poem “Snow Globe (April, 18, 1775) Revere Speaks.” Written from the perspective of Paul Revere, trapped forever on his Midnight Ride, the poem meditates in part on an incident with an enslaved child mentioned in the American Antiquarian Society’s Hugh Hall Papers, 1718-1743.

Travelogos: African Americans and the Struggle for Safe Passage

My residency at the American Antiquarian Society as the William Randolph Hearst Fellow in October and November of 2016 was an invaluable, inspiring and career shifting experience. There are a number of things, people and experiences that coalesced to make the time I spent at the AAS and on its campus that made the experience as remarkable as it was.

When writing my first collection of poems, The Forage House (Red Hen, 2013), I had the privilege of spending a month in residence at the American Antiquarian Society. I was fresh out of my MFA at Boston University, newly minted as “a working poet,” though I didn’t fully know yet what that would come to mean for me. I was working on poems about history, and the American Antiquarian Society had invited me to come.

Bright Advent engages the 17th century translation and publication of the Bible into Algonquian in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the missionary work of the puritan “Apostle to the Indians” the Reverend John Eliot, and the linguistic brilliance of the native translator and Harvard student John Sassamon—the events, characters, and forces that led to King Phillips War in 1675.