Poetry Reading: Enzo Silon Surin & Joan Houlihan

Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born, award-winning poet, educator, librettist, publisher and social advocate. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including When My Body Was A Clinched Fist, winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Awards for Poetry and the forthcoming collection, American Scapegoat. He is co-editor of Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience, and the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation, a PEN New England Discovery Award and a 2020 Denis Diderot Grant as an Artist-in-Residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux in France. Surin teaches creative writing and literature at Bunker Hill Community College and is also Founding Editor and Publisher at Central Square Press and Founder/Executive Director at the Faraday Publishing Company, Inc., a nonprofit literary services and social advocacy organization.

Joan Houlihan is the author of six poetry collections, most recently It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest, winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Award from the Boston Author’s Club. Her previous collections include Shadow-feast, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; The Mending Worm, winner of the New Issues Green Rose Award; The Us, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; the sequel Ay; and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays. Her poems have been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries; The Book of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to Present; and others. She currently serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Houlihan is the founding director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.