Imago Prsents: Authors Tina Cane and Elisa Gabbert in Conversation

Imago Foundation for the Arts will host poet Tina Cane and poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert as part of its Poets in Conversation series at 6:30 PM Thursday, October 17 at Imago Gallery, 36 Market Street in Warren, RI. All are welcome to this free event.
The event, “Look Deeper: Where Poetry and The Essay Meet,” will be facilitated by Vivian Eyre,
a poet and IFA community member, with the goal of creating an informal dialogue between the featured poets and attendees.

Tina Cane is the founder/director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI, and, from 2016-2024, served as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and three children. In her capacity as poet laureate, Cane established her state's first youth poetry ambassador program in partnership with Rhode Island Center for the Book, and brought the Poetry-in-Motion program from the New York City Transit System to Rhode Island's state-wide buses.

Cane is the author of The Fifth Thought, Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz (Skillman Books, 2016), Once More With Feeling (Veliz Books 2017), Body of Work (Veliz Books, 2019), and Year of the Murder Hornet (Veliz Books, 2022). In 2016, Tina received the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She was also a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Her debut novel-in-verse for young adults, Alma Presses Play (Penguin/Random House) was released in September 2021. Cane is also the creator/ curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread, and the editor of Poetry is Bread: The Anthology (forthcoming from Nirala Press, 2024). Her second verse novel for young readers, Are You Nobody Too? (Penguin/ Random House) was released in August 2024.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self (published in June 2024 by FSG). Her other books include Normal Distance, The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, and The Word Pretty. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.