Bosselaar is Featured at Poetry Reading

Belgian-American writer Laure-Anne Bosselaar reads her poetry Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 4 p.m. in Hieronymus Lounge at Westmont’s Kerrwood Hall. The reading, supported by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation to Poets & Writers Inc., is free and open to the public.

Bosselaar, who is fluent in four languages, wrote “The Hour Between Dog and Wolf,” “Small Gods of Grief” and, most recently, “A New Hunger.” “‘A New Hunger’ is a hauntingly lyrical book of poems, in part about her being abandoned as a four-year-old in a convent in Brussels, in part about her adult musings in New York City,” says Paul Willis, Westmont professor of English and Santa Barbara poet laureate. “Laure-Anne Bosselaar brings a craft and a purity—a purity of longing—to everything she touches.”

Bosselaar’s writings have earned a Pushcart Prize, the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry in 2001 and an American Library Association Notable Book award in 2008. Her poems have appeared in the Washington Post, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, AGNI and Harvard Review. Garrison Keillor read two of her poems on NPR’s “The Writers’ Almanac,” and her poems have also been widely anthologized.

Bosselaar and her husband, Kurt Brown, moved to Santa Barbara from New York City and are translating American poetry into French and Flemish poetry into English.

Bosselaar, who teaches creative writing at Pine Manor College, has also taught at Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College and at many conferences. She earned a fellowship at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, was a writer-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and Hamilton College, and was the McEver professor for visiting writers at Georgia Tech University.