Late last month, the ECL in collaboration with the popular Franklin Street coffee shop and book store, Epilogue, welcomed Armfield Visiting Poet Dana Levin for a reading followed by a conversation with ECL Professor Gaby Calvocoressi.
Dana Levin is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent titled Now Do You Know Where You Are (2022). This collection “walks with the reader through the disorientations of personal and collective transformation” and was featured as a New York Times Notable Book, New York Times Editors’ Choice, and NPR Books We Love.
Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Nation. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. A teacher of poetry for over thirty years, Levin currently serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.
In speaking to their excitement for this visit, Prof. Calvocoressi shared their reasons for being “a huge fan”:
“I’m so excited to get to welcome Dana Levin as our Armfield Visiting Poet. She’s so smart and such a compassionate, generous voice for this and all moments. Her poems talk about our vulnerable, hopeful, and ultimately resilient bodies in the world. She builds a vision of community care and radical compassion I really need right now. She teaches me to look honestly and critically at the world and figure out my own complicity and also my own potential for doing good, healing, and being of service in making the world less brutal.”
In addition to the reading, this is also a celebration of the community that Epilogue offers to Chapel Hill! Prof. Calvocoressi lauds it as “a home for literature, kindness, and radical imagination.”