Celebrate the birthday of poet William Cullen Bryant at Cedarmere

The Island Now
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Please join us at Cedarmere on Sunday, November 4th at 2 p.m. for the first in a series of readings by contemporary poets honoring early American poet William Cullen Bryant. A party with refreshments celebrating his 224th birthday will follow the reading. Cedarmere, Bryant’s beautiful home and gardens, a Nassau County Park and Museum, is located at 225 Bryant Avenue, Roslyn Harbor.

This event, sponsored by the Friends of Cedarmere, inaugurates the fourth year of readings by outstanding poets of our time. The event is open to the public as are Bryant’s beautiful gardens and pond on Hempstead Harbor. A voluntary contribution is suggested to help support the restoration of this nationally important historic site and the poetry series.

Nicole Cooley will read from her latest collection, Of Marriage (Alice James, 2018) and from earlier work. She is also the author of The Afflicted Girls about the Salem Witch Trials and the novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love. Cooley is the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translations Programs at Queens College. Her first book of poetry Resurrections won the Walt Whitman Award from the American Academy of Poets. Bryant, Whitman’s poetic father, was praised by Whitman as “the first” American poet and for “touching the highest truths, enthusiasms, [and] duties.”

Cynthia Macdonald, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Poets, has said that Nicole Cooley “speaks in a voice unmistakably her own, a voice which need not demand attention because its quiet confidence is so compelling.”

Willian Cullen Bryant was one of the nation’s pre- eminent journalists in addition to being a pioneering poet. He was editor of The New York Evening Post, an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln and a writer of editorials for workers’ rights, against slavery, and arguing for the importance of the new American Literature. In addition he was a driving force behind the creation of Central Park and the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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