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Please join us as Director of the Creative Writing Program reads from his new book Year of Valentines. With MFA alumni Natalee Cruz (Fiction/Poetry 2023) Sheena Daree Romero (Nonfiction 2022), Dannie Ruth, (Poetry 2019), and Virginia Valenzuela (Poetry/Nonfiction 2019), and poet Chris Campanioni.
Moderated by Lisette Boer (Poetry 2023).
About Year of Valentines:
In Year of Valentines, John Reed writes 80+ valentines to “you” (the loved one, the missed one, the lost one), and to New York City itself. Passionate and cool tempered, Reed’s second collection of sonnets sees creative origins in the No Wave movement—the set of his childhood—with its splendor of dissipation, and merciless affections.
"Readers of contemporary poetry have marveled at what Diane Seuss and Terrance Hayes have accomplished with the serial form. To illuminate another brilliant practitioner, I give you John Reed. … These sonnets follow the misadventures of lovers who slip in and out of identities, variously becoming puppets, magicians, gamblers, witches, skeletons. It’s the speaker in these sonnets who anchors the project. Part id and part lovelorn ghost, we follow a voice into Luna Park and keep going, back into the very real experience of wanting what we want".
—Laura Cronk
"Love poems with built in lies and upside down truths, in which you can find a story of your own—and how you think about relationships".
—Susan Marque, Tin House
Presented by the Creative Writing Program at The New School for Social Research.
John Reed is the author of A Still Small Voice (Delacorte), The Whole (Simon & Schuster / MTV Books), the SPD bestseller, Snowball's Chance (Roof / Melville House), All The World's A Grave: A New Play By William Shakespeare (Penguin / Plume), Tales of Woe (MTV Press), Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems (C&R Press), A Drama In Time: The New School Century (Profile), The Family Dolls: A Manson Paper + Play Book (Outpost19), and The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, and the Origin of Animal Farm (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan)...
The New School offered the first academic creative writing workshop in 1931 and pioneered a new philosophy of education. The idea: students would make their own lives and their own stories part of their education. Today, The New School continues to celebrate and cultivate daring and diverse new voices through its Creative Writing program. The value of this approach is reflected in the publications and achievements of our MFA Creative Writing graduates and faculty.
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John Reed is the author of A Still Small Voice (Delacorte), The Whole (Simon & Schuster / MTV Books), the SPD bestseller, Snowball's Chance (Roof / Melville House), All The World's A Grave: A New Play By William Shakespeare (Penguin / Plume), Tales of Woe (MTV Press), Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems (C&R Press), A Drama In Time: The New School Century (Profile), The Family Dolls: A Manson Paper + Play Book (Outpost19), and The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, and the Origin of Animal Farm (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan); MFA in Creative Writing, Columbia University (fellowship); published in (selected) ElectricLit, the Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, Paper Magazine, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Bomb Magazine, Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, the Believer, the Rumpus, Observer, the PEN Poetry Series, the Daily Beast, Gawker, Slate, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, Vice, The New York Times, Harpers, Rolling Stone; anthologized in (selected) Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin); works translated and performed worldwide; films distinguished at festivals internationally; two-term board member of the National Book Critics Circle; Associate Professor and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.
