Poet Chad Sweeney opens Writers Series with new collection
Poet Chad Sweeney will read from his new collection Nov. 8.
- October 5, 2010
Some may remember poet Chad Sweeney from the 15 years he taught in San Francisco, seven with WritersCorps at south of Market high schools, another seven at the Discovery Center School, and one as poet-in-residence at the San Francisco School of the Arts.
Sweeney is coming back to the Bay Area to read from his just-released book, “Parable of Hide and Seek,” as well as his earlier, “Arranging the Blaze.”
He’ll be the Cal State East Bay English Department’s first Distinguished Writers Series presenter of the academic year at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8 in the Biella Room of the University Library, 25800 Carlos Bee Blvd., Hayward. A book signing will follow.
Now a Ph.D. candidate at Western Michigan University, he has also written “An Architecture” and "The Selected Poems of H.E. Sayeh: The Art of Stepping Through Time" (translated from the Farsi with Mojdeh Marashi).
Susan Gubernat, associate professor of English and series director, says, "Chad Sweeney – poet, editor, translator, teacher – represents the trajectory that a new generation of poets is taking, and it is all upward: visionary, yet still rooted in the things of this world.”
In “The Café Review” Thom Dawkins wrote, “In ‘Parable of Hide and Seek’ Sweeney has pared down the language until each poem becomes something of a koan or a short Gnostic parable.
“Sweeney’s poems . . . are never sentimental, but it is clear from the first word to the last that this is someone who pays close attention to the world, to the names and sounds of things, as any good poet should.”
His compilation of WritersCorps’ first 15 years, “Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: the Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose,” samples the work from 50 San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York poets, playwrights, and fiction writers.
While in San Francisco, Sweeney’s WritersCorps students lived in San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods and consisted of newly-arrived immigrants from Central America and Asia and African Americans from Hunters Point, Bay View, the Western Addition, the Mission and the Tenderloin. They performed their poems for radio and television, in Washington, D.C. and Santa Fe, N.M., in bookstores and cultural centers all over the Bay Area and at home plate of Giants Stadium.
Sweeney also has published five chapbooks of poetry, including “A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer” (Tarpaulin Sky, 2006) and the bilingual (English/Spanish) “Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney de las Minas de Cobre” (Forklift, 2010), which has been translated into Catalán by poet Anna Aguilar-Amat of Barcelona.
He edited the anthology “Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: the Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose” (CityLights, 2009) and is coeditor of “Parthenon West Review,” a print journal of contemporary poetry, translation and essays, based in San Francisco.
The reading is free and open to all. Campus parking is $2 per hour at meters, or $10 per day, per vehicle – payable at kiosk machines that take dollars and quarters.
CSUEB welcomes persons with disabilities and will provide reasonable accommodation upon request. Please notify event sponsor in advance at (510) 885-3151, if accommodation is needed.