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Join us at the CAP Artspace on the Commons for a poetry and prose reading featuring an all-Ithaca group of Saltonstall residency alums: Tina Chang ’06, Emily Fridlund ’23, Sarah Jefferis ’14 + ’19, and Clare Jones ’22.
This reading is part of the annual Spring Writes Literary Festival sponsored by the Community Arts Partnership.
The Community Arts Partnership (CAP) Artspace is located at 110 N. Tioga St (on Ithaca Commons) inside the Tompkins Center for History and Culture.
About the writers
TINA CHANG is an American poet, educator, and editor. In 2010, she was the first woman to be named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and she served in this role for over a decade. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, she is the author of three critically acclaimed collections: Hybrida (W. W. Norton, May 2019), Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books, 2011), and Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004). She is a professor and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater, Binghamton University, where she also oversees the initiatives under the Binghamton Center for Writers.
She is the co-editor of the seminal anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008), which was hailed as, “One of the 10 greatest international anthologies, a timeless resource” by the Academy of American Poets, and was praised by the Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Poets & Writers and many other periodicals. Of the anthology, poet Carolyn Forché said, “Read Language for a New Century as you would a field guide to the human condition in our time, a poetic survival manual.”
Chang is the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Van Lier Foundation among others. In 2011, she was awarded The Women of Excellence Award for her outreach and literary impact on the Brooklyn community. In 2014 and 2017, Brooklyn magazine named Chang one of the 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn culture. She is the recipient of the 2020 Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Her work often brings her to international audiences in China, Singapore, Hong Kong, among many other parts of the world and she has traveled on behalf of the US Embassy for public diplomacy speaking engagements under the auspices of the US Department of State to illuminate her poetic process and to share her work.
EMILY FRIDLUND grew up in Minnesota. Her first novel, History of Wolves, was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. History of Wolves was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of USA Today’s Notable Books, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and a #1 Indie Next pick. The opening chapter was awarded the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction.
Fridlund’s debut collection of stories, Catapult, won the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, New Orleans Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She earned an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.
SARAH JEFFERIS is an author, editor, writing coach, and CEO of Write.Now. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from Hollins University, an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton.<
Her most recent poetry collection, What Enters the Mouth, was published in February 2017 by Standing Stone Books. Ansel Elkins, the author of Blue Yodel, said that “these are fearless poems—a reckoning of the violence of girlhood rendered with grit and clarity.”
Forgetting the Salt, her first book of poetry was published by Foothills Press in 2008. She won the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Prize for her poem “Motherhood.” Additionally, her poems and nonfiction work have appeared in Rhino, The Mississippi Review, The American Literary Review, Stone Canoe, Icon, The Hollins Critic, The Patterson Review, The Healing Muse, The Cimmaron Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and other journals. Her essay “Blood and Chocolate” appears in the anthology Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2014.
She has been both a poetry and fiction fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in California and held residencies in poetry and creative nonfiction at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in New York, and at The Studios at Mass MOCA.
She is currently working on her first novel, Running After Jesus, as well as her third collection of poetry, After Marriage. She is also working on a collection of essays about interracial relationships and eradicating white privilege.
CLARE JONES is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Program, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a graduate of Carleton College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Iowa Center for the Book. She received the Keats-Shelley Prize for her essay “Bat, Bat,Come Under My Hat.” She holds the degree of Master of Philosophy in Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies from Queens’ College, Cambridge.