Uploaded September 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A reading and conversation with Marilyn Hacker, Karthika Naïr, and Emilie Biggs at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 05/09/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Two of the most innovative poets of our age explore creativity, collaboration, and the ways different art forms can intersect and enrich one another.
Join Marilyn Hacker, one of the most celebrated figures in American poetry, and Karthika Naïr, known for her dynamic work at the borders of dance, poetry, and the visual arts, as they discuss the many migrations of the poetic voice. When confinement forced artists into their homes, Hacker and Naïr adopted an ancient poetic technique, the renga, in order to co-author A Different Distance: a poetic exploration of distance, written at a distance, as a way of understanding and overcoming it. Hacker, an award-winning translator of French into English, and Nair, known for adapting narrative into dance performance, are masters of movement. They consider the poetic act as that of bridging distance between disparate and linked images, sounds, languages, cultures, and forms.
About the speakers:
Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, most recently, Calligraphies (2023), and translator of twenty-three books of poetry and essays. She has received the Lenore Marshall Prize and the Voelcker Award from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN Award in Translation, the Audre Lorde Prize and the National Book Award. She was editor of the Kenyon Review for five years, and on the editorial collective of the French journal Siècle 21 for eight.
Poet, librettist, and fabulist, Karthika Naïr is the coauthor of A Different Distance, renga written with Marilyn Hacker. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year, and was highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes. The dance performances Naïr has scripted and co-scripted have been staged at venues across the world. These include Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning DESH and Until the Lions, and Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa, a queer reimagining of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
A reading and conversation with Marilyn Hacker, Karthika Naïr, and Emilie Biggs at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 05/09/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Two of the most innovative poets of our age explore creativity, collaboration, and the ways different art forms can intersect and enrich one another.
Join Marilyn Hacker, one of the most celebrated figures in American poetry, and Karthika Naïr, known for her dynamic work at the borders of dance, poetry, and the visual arts, as they discuss the many migrations of the poetic voice. When confinement forced artists into their homes, Hacker and Naïr adopted an ancient poetic technique, the renga, in order to co-author A Different Distance: a poetic exploration of distance, written at a distance, as a way of understanding and overcoming it. Hacker, an award-winning translator of French into English, and Nair, known for adapting narrative into dance performance, are masters of movement. They consider the poetic act as that of bridging distance between disparate and linked images, sounds, languages, cultures, and forms.
About the speakers:
Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, most recently, Calligraphies (2023), and translator of twenty-three books of poetry and essays. She has received the Lenore Marshall Prize and the Voelcker Award from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN Award in Translation, the Audre Lorde Prize and the National Book Award. She was editor of the Kenyon Review for five years, and on the editorial collective of the French journal Siècle 21 for eight.
Poet, librettist, and fabulist, Karthika Naïr is the coauthor of A Different Distance, renga written with Marilyn Hacker. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year, and was highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes. The dance performances Naïr has scripted and co-scripted have been staged at venues across the world. These include Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning DESH and Until the Lions, and Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa, a queer reimagining of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
