Cole Swensen, Forrest Gander, and Jen Bervin

Marin native Cole Swensen is joined by Forrest Gander and Jen Bervin for a night of poetry at the bookstore. The trio will read from new work and discuss their latest projects.

About On Walking On:

On Walking On looks outward onto—or rather, walks through—the work of various writers for whom walking was or is an important element of daily life. The number of writers who were or are serious walkers is striking, and the connection goes back to antiquity, more recently including Woolf, Nerval, Sand, Debord, Sebald, and many others.

About Gave:

A river is a rift that joins what it divides, and so, logically, mythically, it's always a river that cuts this life off from every other. A river determines every layer of all the lives along its entire length--the industry, the agriculture, the cultural possibilities, the historical imperatives, the reigning aesthetics, and so much more that cannot be or simply never happens to be traced. This account of a river attempts to embrace them all.

Cole Swensen's work has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the New American Writing Award, and the National Poetry Series, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Also a translator, she won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. She lives in Paris and Providence, Rhode Island.

Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up, for the most part, in Virginia. With degrees in both geology and English literature, Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, translation, fiction, and essays. He’s the A.K. Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University. A U.S. Artists Rockefeller fellow, Gander has been recipient of grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim, Howard, Witter Bynner and Whiting foundations. His 2011 collection Core Samples from the World was an NBCC and Pulitzer Prize finalist for poetry.

Jen Bervin is an interdisciplinary artist and poet whose research-driven works weave together art, writing, science, and life. She has published ten books, including Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems. The recipient of a Creative Capital grant, she lives in Berkeley, California.