“Small Wonders” Haiku Contest

The 2023 Haiku Contest is now over. Thank you all for your submissions. Winners were announced at end of the KPS reading on September 17, 2023 and their names and the wonderful poems can be seen here.


Upcoming Readings for 2023

October 22, 2023: Henri Cole

Photo by Susan Unterberg
Read KPS’s exclusive Interview with Henri Cole, conducted by Ann van Buren.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan and raised in Virginia.  He has published ten collections of poetry and received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book is Orphic Paris, a memoir, published by New York Review Books. From 2010 to 2014, he was poetry editor of The New Republic. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Boston. More Info >>


Voices of Poetry: Three Poets Read

Maria Lisell, Dennis Nurkse, Sean Singer

November 11 @ 3:00 pm at the Katonah Village Library

Sponsored by Voices of Poetry & Katonah Village Library

Maria Lisell, Dennis Nurkse, and Sean Singer. More info >>


Upcoming Readings for 2024

April 14, 2024: Jennifer Michael Hecht

photo by Max Hecht-Chaneski

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, historian, and commentator. Her most recent book is The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023) a guide to using poetry to find meaning, invoke awe, and rest in some clarity of mind. She is the author of the bestseller Doubt: A History, a history of religious and philosophical doubt all over the world, throughout history. In Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It (Yale University Press, 2013) she scrutinizes the moral status of suicide. Her The Happiness Myth (HarperOne, 2007), brings a historical eye to modern wisdom about how to lead a good life.  Hecht’s The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology won Phi Beta Kappa’s 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “For scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.”  Her books have been translated into many languages. More Info>>


May 12, 2024: Mark Irwin

Mark Irwin - poetMark Irwin’s most recent book is Joyful Orphan published in spring of 2023. He is the author of ten other collections of poetry, which include Shimmer (2020), A Passion According to Green (2017), American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014), Large White House Speaking (2013), Tall If (2008), Bright Hunger (2004), White City (2000), Quick, Now, Always (1996), and Against the Meanwhile: Three Elegies (1988). He has also translated Philippe Denis’ Notebook of Shadows and Nichita Stanescu’s Ask the Circle to Forgive You: Selected Poems. His collection of essays, Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry, was published in 2017. His poetry and essays have appeared in many literary magazines including The American Poetry Review, Agni Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Pleiades, Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, New American Writing, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Southern Review. More Info>>


Read our exclusive interviews with Matthew Olzmann, Franny Choi, Kevin Pilkington, Peter Filkins, Dana Levin, Jenny Xie, Arthur Sze, Dan Chiasson, Forrest Gander, Rosanna Warren, Laura Kasischke, Gregory Djanikian, Timothy Donnelly, Timothy Liu, Diana GoetschDeborah Landau, Maggie Smith, Brenda Shaughnessy, Carl Phillips, Major Jackson, and Alan Shapiro.
 
If you say on the steps of the Katonah Village Library for the past 35 years, nearly every notable American poet would have walked by. - Billy Collins, Poet Laureate
KPS has been presenting readings by prominent poets under the auspices of the Katonah Village Library since 1967.