Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles

Red Hen Press

February 6, 2012

Red Hen Press, in association with the Geffen Playhouse, is pleased to invite you to spend an evening with the finest authors of our time at Red Hen’s Monday Evenings at the Geffen. Join us as we feature award-winning writers Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Katharine Coles. For more information on this reading, please contact publicity@redhen.org.

Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. He has published three full-length collections of poetry, in addition to eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written two opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German.


David Mason is the Poet Laureate of Colorado. His books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals. His verse-novel, Ludlow, won the Colorado Book Award in 2007, and was named Best Poetry Book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Mason is the author of an essay collection, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, and a memoir, News from the Village, which appeared in 2010. A new collection of essays, Two Minds of a Western Poet, followed in 2011. He recently won the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Creativity in Motion Prize for the development of a new libretto. A former Fulbright fellow to Greece, he lives near the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs and teaches at Colorado College.


Katharine Coles is the Poet Laureate of Utah. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and North American Review. As the inaugural director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, she edited and co-authored Blueprints: Bringing Poetry to Communities; co-authored Poetry and New Media: A User’s Guide, for which she also directed the working group; and co-facilitated the production of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry.  She is a full professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Utah, where she founded and co-directs the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature.  In 2010, she traveled to Antarctica to write poems under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program; her collection-in-progress, Cold Heart, comprises poems from that project.