Celebrate Poetry Month and join us for a reading by Brit Washburn from her new book of poetry, What is Given. She will be in conversation with award-winning poet and author Ed Falco.

Brit Washburn’s tender and generous new collection of poems, What Is Given, shimmers with a fierce sense of gratitude for the daily stuff of our lives. In poems acutely aware of loss, Washburn comes back again and again to the redeeming beauty of the sensual world. These are poems infused with love and a profound trust in, as she titles one of her poems, “the radical hospitality of the senses.” With poetry that reminds us to be grateful for what is given, to be “astonished by the fox / we’d seen in passing” and thankful for “the peaches we ate/on the riverbank,” Washburn establishes herself as a necessary poet for our difficult times.

--Ed Falco, author of X in the Tickseed and recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Prize in Poetry.

Brit Washburn's Notwithstanding introduces a true talent, every well-crafted poem is as wise as it is earned. It is a book of love and loss and the sensuality of food and nature, qualities often blended in poem after poem. It's a book that stays home, “one season slipping into the next...” about which she says, “I’ve been through this before: I know how to eat and swim and sleep alone, how to savor a sensation without sharing it, how to carry on.” An exquisite sensibility at work here.

—Stephen Dunn, author of Whereas: Poems, (W. W. Norton & Company), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Brit Washburn is the author of the essay and poetry collections, and has been awarded an artist's grant by the Vermont Studio Center and for many years served on the boards of the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the Low Country Initiative on the Literary Arts (LILA). She co-directed the salon Poets House South and has worked as a freelance writer, editor, and indexer, a Montessori teacher, and instructor in the Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina Asheville. She is the mother of four and a student in the MFA program at Virginia Tech. Her work can be found in print and online via www.britwashburn.com.