Please enjoy this photo gallery taken on Saturday evening at Hollywood Forever. Anne Carson gave a "formal" reading, enchanting a packed house with a selection of several different poetic forms.

Photos by Casey Curry.

PRESS RELEASE

Hollywood Forever and PEN Center USA Present: A Reading by Anne Carson

Carson will read from NOX in the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever.

Los Angeles, CA:  On January 21, 2012, Hollywood Forever and PEN Center USA will present a reading by Anne Carson from her latest book of poetry, NOX. Gabrielle Calvocoressi will make the introduction. Doors open at 8PM, and the reading will begin at 9PM. A book signing will follow the reading.

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and professor of Classics. She has published sixteen books, the latest of which is NOX (New Directions, 2010), a book of poetry. Antigonick (New Directions, 2011), a comic book of Sophocles’ Antigone with art by Bianca Stone, is forthcoming. She has taught Classics at University of Calgary, Princeton University, Emory University, McGill University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, and CCAC Institute Oakland and San Francisco. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, National Book Critics Circle Award Nominations, the Los Angeles Times Book Critics Award, and the MacArthur “Genius” Award. She is currently the Distinguished Poet in Residence at New York University.
 
NOX is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Carson created after the death of her brother.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea. 2005) and Apocalyptic Swing (Persea. 2009), which was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer's Award and a fellowship to Civitella di Ranieri in Umbria. She was recently awarded a prestigious Writing Residency Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in Marfa. Her poems have been featured in the Washington Post and on Garrison Keillor's Poet's Almanac and in numerous journals. She lives in Los Angeles where she is the Poetry Editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

The Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever is a California Historic Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places. Built in 1927 by the Freemasons, it was originally called the Southland Masonic Temple until its membership merged with another temple in Los Angeles in 1951 and its doors were closed. Used for storage for more than fifty years, it was recently restored and is now used for select public and private cultural events.

PEN Center USA is a literary nonprofit based in Beverly Hills, CA, with a membership of more than 600 professional writers. PEN Center USA strives to protect the rights of writers around the world, to stimulate interest in the written word, and to foster a vital literary community among the diverse writers living in the western United States. PEN Center USA has a long, successful history planning literary events in and around Los Angeles; special programming has taken place at The Hammer, The Hotel Café, Largo at the Coronet, The Echo, Actor’s Gang, The Hammer, The Pacific Design Center, and The Beverly Hills Hotel.

The Masonic Lodge is located at 6000 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90038. Tickets for the event cost $15 and are on sale now at Ticketfly.com. Parking is FREE on site. For more information about this event, please contact Michelle Meyering, Director of Programs and Events at PEN Center USA, at michelle@penusa.org. Please note: the Masonic Lodge is not handicapped accessible.