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March 11, 2013

Lenore Weiss reads her award-winning poetry at ULM March 21

Award-winning poet Lenore Weiss will read her poetry at the University of Louisiana at Monroe at 7 p.m., Thursday, March 21, in Hemphill Hall 134.

The event is free and open to the public.

ULM Professor of English Jack Heflin said, “The English Department is happy to host a reading by the Bay Area poet Lenore Weiss whose latest book, ‘Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island,’ celebrates her Jewish heritage in poems that honor for example the life of the martyr Hannah Senesh or that praise the work of the Israeli musician Yair Dalal.

The poems in the book also reflect upon the bizarre presence of technology in our worlds and upon our continued dependence upon the natural and the pastoral. We are lucky to have her on campus. Lenore Weiss joins a long list of poets and writers who have read at ULM.”

In her full collection “Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island,” published in 2012 by West End Press, Weiss embodies the themes of loss, transformation and re-invention that are integral to life and to her work.

Poems also celebrate the author’s Jewish Hungarian upbringing. Survival, negotiation, and migration play a vital role in these poems about family and love.

Another thread in her work focuses on technology and its role in relationships, and Weiss has had practical applications of both during her professional career as a content developer, most recently for Apple Computer.

These mysteries of family, politics, and technology build a powerful debut that details one woman’s migrations through life’s spheres and how the connections expand and weave themselves together into one functioning network.

Her other collections include “Tap Dancing on the Silverado Trail” (2011) from Finishing Line Press and “Sh’ma Yis’rael” (2007) from Pudding House Publications. She is a contributing editor to radiuslit.org. 

Weiss’s work has been widely published online and in journals including “Digital Americana,” “Technoculture,” “Conclave,” “riverbabble,” “The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion,” “Exquisite Corpse,” “Nimrod International Journal,” “Copper Nickel,” and “Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal” as well as anthologized in “Not a Muse: Inner Lives of Women” and “Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems.” 

Weiss now lives in Sterlington and is working on several new projects.

For more information, visit her blog at www.lenoreweiss.com.

For more information about this event, please contact Heflin at helfin@ulm.edu of 318-342-1521.

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