Columbus: Maggie Schwed's "Driving to the Bees"

Please join us on Monday, April 20th at 7pm for a launch party for Maggie Schwed's new book of poems, Driving to the Bees. Reading with her in celebration are David Corcoran, Helen Barnard, Richard Sime, and Wendy Weinstein.

"In these visceral, lovely poems, Maggie Schwed meditates on farming as both a vocation and a metaphor for creation and self-knowledge. There's transcendence and bounty here, but the minds at work in these formally inventive poems are too complex and restless to settle for long. Instead, Schwed finds in the difficult lives of animals and the hard work of farming moments for understanding familial love, harrowing violence, accident and unpredictable joy. These lush, constantly shifting landscapes reflect back on us, offering striking revelations about our own moments of human beauty, loss, and inescapable mortality. Driving to the Bees is a thoughtful and deeply moving collection."--Kevin Prufer.

Maggie Schwed's poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Witness, Raritan, Southwest Review, Commonweal, Pleiades, Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines, on-line publications, and anthologies. A finalist for the 2006 and 2009 Morton Marr Poetry Prize (Southwest Review) and for the 2008 Erskine J. Poetry Prize (Smartish Pace), she is winner of The Malahat Review's 2011 Long Poem Contest. Her chapbook, Out of Season, was published in 2008 by Finishing Line Press. She reviews for Pleiades, Blackbird, and Smartish Pace. Maggie lives with her husband in New York City, where she taught high-school English and adult literacy while her children were growing up. She is now a livestock farmhand with the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Driving to the Bees is her first full-length book of poems.

W.R. Weinstein's poems have appeared in Barrow Street and Verse Daily.  She is a film critic for Film Journal International, and lives in New York City with her husband.

After careers in middle school teaching and magazine editing, Helen Barnard turned to writing poetry in earnest. She has taken numerous classes and workshops, and been associated with the people in this reading for many years. Poetry and the writing of poetry is a big adventure, with lots of self-knowledge as well as an increased sense of skill and mastery coming out of it. Helen's work has appeared in a number of journals and magazines, most notably The New Republic and Barrow Street.