Witter Bynner Fellowship Poetry Reading by Monica Youn and Matthew Thorburn

Friday, October 24
7PM Carole Huxley Theatre, New York State Museum, Downtown Albany

U. S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic has chosen two New Yorkers for the Witter Bynner Prize of the Library of Congress. The prize was created in 1980 to support the work of young poets and “new voices in poetry.” The New York Center for the Book and the New York State Library are sponsoring a reading by this year’s honorees, Monica Youn and Matthew Thorburn.

A former Rhodes Scholar and Wallace Stegner Fellow, Monica Youn is a media and entertainment attorney at NYU Law School’s Brennan Center, as well as a creative writing instructor at Columbia University. Her collections include Barter (2003), and the forthcoming Ignatz, which is inspired by the mouse of the early 20th century comic strip, “Krazy Kat.” Her poems have appeared in numerous collections, including the Norton Anthology: Language for a New Century.

Matthew Thorburn, a business writer for an international law firm and founder of the little magazine Good Foot, is a past winner of the Mississippi Review Prize and the Belfast Poetry Festival’s first Festivo Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, and The American Poetry Review. His first collection, Subject to Change (2004), deals with the mutable nature of language, memory, and meaning in everyday life.