Celebrate the 225th birthday of poet William Cullen Bryant

The Island Now

Join us at Cedarmere for a reading by Willa Carroll, a contemporary American poet, honoring Bryant, America’s earliest and most popular poet on Sunday, May 19 at 2 p.m. A party with refreshments celebrating his 225th birthday will follow. Cedarmere, Bryant’s beautiful home and gardens, a Nassau County Park and Museum, is located at 225 Bryant Avenue, Roslyn Harbor, NY 11576.

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

Willa Carroll will read from “Nerve Chorus,” her acclaimed first book, one of Entropy Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of 2018 and a Small Press Best Seller. A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she was a winner of the Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize and Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest. Video readings of her poems are featured on “Narrative Outloud.”

Tracy K. Smith writes that Carroll’s “nimble poems grapple with what it means to belong to a body, a family, a country. With rigor and dark wit.” Andrea Juricvc, recalling that Carroll was an experimental dancer and actor, asserts that “her remarkable debut collection . . . reminds us that much of our experience transcends our verbal abilities . . . with personal subject matter and elegant, yet accessible philosophical explorations.”

In the natural-movement school of dance, Carroll has been described as “an angelic-looking woman who stirs up trouble.” She collaborated with artists, including text-based projects with her filmmaker husband. She has a BA and MFA from Bennington College and has taught at universities, writing centers, and public schools. willacarroll.com

Her reading at Cedarmere comes after her appearance at the LA Festival of Books and Greenwich Village’s historic Cornelia Street Café. A celebration of Bryant’s birthday follows the reading with refreshments.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), a pioneering American poet and a preeminent journalist, was against slavery, supported Lincoln, workers’ rights, and our national literature. Bryant, a very important NYC civic leader, was the driving force behind the creation of Central Park and the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other cultural institutions.                                                                                                                    The year-long celebration of Bryant’s 225th birthday, sponsored by the Friends of Cedarmere, also includes a roundtable discussion of his relevance today and a pageant celebrating his life in Manhattan’s Bryant Park in July and September and at Cedarmere in Roslyn. It culminates on his 225th birthday, Sunday, November 3 at 2 p.m. at Cedarmere with a reading in his honor by outstanding poets from the last five years.

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