THURSDAY, JULY 22, 7:30 p.m.
POETRY READING at Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts
ALLISON BENIS WHITE
Please join us for a poetry reading by Allison Benis White, Self-Portrait with Crayon (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009).
Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts
2904 College Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94705
510-704-8222
Cole Swenson writes about Self-Portrait with Crayon by Allison Benis White:
“An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting.”
Allison Benis White’s poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades, among other journals. Her honors include the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Bernice Slote Award from Prairie Schooner, and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She is currently at work on a second poetry manuscript, “Small Porcelain Head,” which received the 2008 James D. Phelan Literary Award for a work in progress from the San Francisco Foundation. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine.