Sponsored by the Ulster Community College Foundation, The Poetry Forum is an annual event which brings well-known and award-winning poets to SUNY Ulster for intimate question and answer sessions, as well as a special reading of their poetry. In 2007, the program was renamed the Ellen Robbins Poetry Forum to honor the memory of Ellen Robbins (1952-2006) who was on the faculty at SUNY Ulster from 1994 until 2006, and Chair of the English department, 2002-2006.

Tina Chang
Thursday, April 23, 2015, 11:45AM
College Lounge, Vanderlyn Hall

TINA CHANG, Brooklyn Poet Laureate, was the first woman named to this position. She is the author of the poetry collections Half-Lit Houses and Of Gods & Strangers. She is also co-editor of the acclaimed W.W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. Her poems have been published in American Poet, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and Ploughshares among many others.  She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, among others. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and she is also a member of the international writing faculty at the City University of Hong Kong, the first low-residency MFA program to be established in Asia. Thomas Impola, Associate Professor of English at SUNY Ulster, will interview Ms. Chang and moderate the audience discussion.

Previous Poets include: Richard Blanco, Jorie Graham, Michael Dickman, Ted Kooser, Charles Simic, Naomi Shihab Nye, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jane Hirshfield, Michael McClure, Marge Piercy, Kenneth Koch, Robert Creeley, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Carolyn Forché, Sharon Olds