Elana Bell and Tiffany Higgins

4 APRIL 2013 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Elana Bell and Tiffany Higgins, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor @poetryflash.org, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, moesbooks.com)

More about the readers
Elana Bell's book of poems, Eyes, Stones (Louisiana State University Press, 2012), is the 2011 winner of the prestigious Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Fanny Howe, who says, "Elana Bell has undertaken a task many others have avoided: facing the agony of the Palestine-Israel conflict and its history.…She gives her voice over to others without changing her vocabulary or her beat. Elements basic to life—bread, fruit, water, and rats—are here in profusion. These poems are built for our time." Bell has conducted poetry workshops for educators, women in prison, and high school students in Israel, Palestine, and throughout the five boroughs of New York City.
Tiffany Higgins's debut book of poems is And Aeneas Stares Into Her Helmet (Carolina Wren Press, 2009), winner of the 2008 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Contest, selected by Evie Shockley. Patrick Herron says of it, "Tiffany Higgins' anachronistic and recast hero is one brilliantly charged nexus of exploitation and war; she is captured, tortured, and released as a series of heartbreaking lyrics. A stunning book." In the collection, we follow the story of its main character, Aeneas, a female American soldier, and trace her journey through our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, always linking these scenes to our daily life here at home. Tiffany Higgins has translated poems of the Lebanese writer Nadia Tuéni from the French, and recordings of her poems are forthcoming on From the Fishouse, an online audio archive (www.fishousepoems.org). She blogs at http://tifhiggins.blogspot.com.