Congratulations to Alicia Ostriker for winning the Jewish National Book Award in Poetry for The Book of Seventy! Ostiker will be presented with the award on Tuesday, March 9 at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan.

Richard Tayson's books are The World Underneath, The Apprentice of Fever , which won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and Look Up for Yes. A New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, Tayson has received a Pushcart Prize and is now a Chancellors Fellow in the PhD program in English at City University of New York's Graduate Center where he is writing about William Blake's influence on American avant-garde culture.

"Tayson takes us inside the mind of one character, then moves us toward the actions and responses of other characters, and finally into a sort of beatific world-mind. . . .While moving through bodies and time and space, while exploring the world underneath facile surfaces, the reader is brought face-to-face with mortality, hate, and complacency, but also with compassion, understanding, and the higher self."
Brent Calderwood, Lambda Book Report

"Reading Richard Tayson's The World Underneath rejoices my heart and gives me a little hope for both humanity and poetry. I read with awe the sequence in which this gay poet attends his sister-in-law's home delivery of a son, after flying "over one of the nineteen states/ that still puts people like me/in prison. O Texas, O Tennessee,/ sweet Georgia with your one-to-twenty/ years felony." Tayson's language is fast-moving, passionate, compassionate--alive with physical, spiritual and political detail that makes him heir to Muriel Rukeyser."
Alicia Suskin Ostriker

"I especially rejoice for [Tayson's] poems of intimacy and friendship with women, women who he sees not as 'other,' but as people struggling with the same concerns that he has. This sensibility is a rare contribution to our literature!"
Toi Derricotte"

"It's a rare treat when a poet achieves such mature work as these gritty poems, celebrating his epiphanic moments, among them the miracles of childbirth and his life with his lover. Even his dark rage against the injustice of homophobic violence comes not out of weakness but from strength. What makes The World Underneath satisfying is how the poems burst into flame, into verbal explosions, scattering a glitter of magic."
Edward Field

Queensborough Community College
Wednesday, May 5, 1 pm

The Blake Society, London
Annual Blake Lecture
Tuesday, June 8

RECENT PAST READINGS

New York
The Graduate Center, CUNY
The World Underneath
February 15, 2008

Radio show: The Moe Green Poetry Hour
The World Underneath
February 20, 2008

New School University
The World Underneath
February 25, 2008

The Ear Inn
The World Underneath
March 15, 2008

Queens Public Library, Briarwood
The World Underneath
June 12, 2008

Interview: NPR's "Poetry Off the Shelf"
"The Casualties of Walt Whitman"
http://podcastdownload.npr.org
July 12, 2008

Living Theater
The World Underneath
July 28, 2008

LGBT Center, Manhattan
My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them
May 13, 2009

Queens Public Library, Jackson Heights
The World Underneath
June 16, 2009

Bryant Park Word for Word Poetry Series
The World Underneath
July 14, 2009

Graduate Center, CUNY
My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them
October 16, 2009

New York University
My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them
Friday, October 30, 2009

Ohio
Kent State University
Wick Poetry Center 25th Anniversary Celebration
The World Underneath
November 17-18, 2008

Chicago, Illinois
AWP Conference
Kent State U. Press & Wick Poetry Center
The World Underneath
Feb. 13, 2009

New Jersey
Princeton Library
The World Underneath
with Alicia Ostriker
May 28, 2008

Highland Park Public Library
The World Underneath
November 6, 2008

Colorado
University of Colorado, Denver
The World Underneath
April 21, 2008

University of Northern Colorado
The World Underneath
with Mary Crow
April 22, 2008

Colorado State University, Fort Collins
The World Underneath
April 24, 2008