Robin Becker
Photo: Chris Felver

Robin Becker, Armen Davoudian, Benjamin Gucciardi

21 JUNE 2026 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a Father's Day poetry reading by Robin Becker, Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, Armen Davoudian, The Palace of Forty Pillars, and Benjamin Gucciardi, West Portal, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm (poetryflash.org).


The featured books will be available at the reading, and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. Bookshop.org financially supports independent bookstores. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Robin Becker's new book is Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, featuring selections from each of her previously published books and nearly thirty new poems. Robin Becker is considered by many to be the foremost feminist poet of her generation. Sandra Yannone says, "For decades, and certainly since her Lambda Literary Award-winning All-American Girl, Robin Becker has inspired and instructed us on how to be the portrait of the artist as a Jewish woman, a lesbian, a sister, a daughter, a lover, a traveler, and a teacher of the craft of poetry. With grace and grit, the poems that span her career now reside together in one volume to magnify their mastery and thematic conversations over time." Becker is the author of eight previous books of poetry, including The Black Bear Inside Me, Tiger Heron, Domain of Perfect Affection, The Horse Fair, All-American Girl, and Giacometti's Dog, all published in the Pitt Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and National Endowment for the Arts. Liberal Arts Research Professor of English Emerita at Penn State, Becker served as the Penn State Laureate during the 2010-2011 academic year. Her poetry column, "Field Notes," appeared, for many years, in The Women's Review of Books, where she served as Poetry Editor. She has published book reviews in many journals including The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and Prairie Schooner. Recent poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review and The New Yorker.

Armen Davoudian's debut collection is The Palace of Forty Pillars, winner of the Northern/ California Book Award in Poetry 2025 and long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He has also translated works from Persian into English, including Fatemeh Shams's Hopscotch, and his chapbook, Swan Song, won the Frost Place Competition. Mary Jo Salter says, "The Palace of Forty Pillars heralds a new but already accomplished voice in American poetry, and indeed of an evolving America. Davoudian, born in Iran and Armenian by heritage, is a young master of the English language who brings to mind the high-culture wit of James Merrill and the affecting reticence of Elizabeth Bishop. Davoudian is also irrepressibly contemporary, as in 'Coming out of the Shower,' which shows him negotiating his identity as a gay man in a family whose traditions involve both deep affection and a knowing silence. The dazzling title poem, a sequence of twenty fresh and surprising sonnets, begins with the epigraph 'Isfahan is half the world'…There are twenty quite perfect poems here, if we count the sequence of twenty sonnets as a single poem; there are word-games, and worlds within words, and clever rhymes. Yet we feel the poet has spoken to us heart to heart, with a naturalness we trust." Armen Davoudian's poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, and Literary Matters. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and lives in California.

Benjamin Gucciardi most recent book is West Portal, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and Julie Suk Award. Calvocoressi says, "The beautiful and the terrible live alongside each other in this work. And so often, they're actually the same thing. Or they are happening all at once. There is such deep searching in this book and such formal precision. And the language is luminous, which makes the harrowing physical and psychic landscape even more profound." His forthcoming collection Arguments, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award, will be published later this year. His previous works are the chapbooks Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage, winner of the 2020 Quarterly West Chapbook contest, and I Ask My Sister's Ghost. His poems have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and POETRY. Recent work has been featured in Poetry Daily and On Being's Poetry Unbound. His honors include the James Dickey Poetry Prize, Booth Prize for Unexpected Literature, Milton Kessler Memorial Prize from Harpur Palate, and fellowships and residencies from Sewanee Writers' Conference, PLAYA, Artsmith, and more. He founded Soccer Without Borders in 2006 and continues to work with refugee and immigrant youth through soccer, education, and community-building.