Renowned poets to read at Alhambra High’s Ecopoetry event

MARTINEZ, Calif. – Join the National Park Service (NPS) and Alhambra High School students for the 2017 Ecopoetry Event.  This is the 3rd annual event, staged in the historic Victorian home where the celebrated naturalist, John Muir, lived and wrote his books. The event will be held on Friday May 19, from 6-8 p.m. at the John Muir National Historic Site (NHS) in Martinez.

This year’s poetry reading in the parlor of the John Muir House will feature internationally known poet Jane Hirschfield, Heyday Books publisher Malcolm Margolin, and the poetry of W.S. Merwin. Hirshfield, a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), long-listed for the National Book Award and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015.  Other honors include the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.

Hirshfield’s work has always been engaged with the natural world and grounded in the Buddhist sense of interconnection, and recent poems address the subject of climate crisis with increasing directness. Her poems have been selected for eight editions of The Best American Poetry and appear regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and Orion. She is a frequent presenter at universities and literary festivals in this country and around the world.

Malcolm Margolin is the former publisher of Heydey Press, which has published books since the ‘70s that celebrate California’s natural world.  His own non-fiction work, The Ohlone Way, was named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the 100 most important books published by a western writer in the 20th Century.  In addition, he has been the leading promoter and publisher of Native Californian literature, both recovered and contemporary.  Margolin will read and serve as raconteur, which – if you’ve never seen him – is a skill he has honed to perfection.

W.S. Merwin, celebrated for decades, has been writing some of his greatest poetry recently, as he continues to explore the existential nature of the wild, as well as time and timelessness.  Former Ecopoetry participants, as well as students of Alhambra, will be invited to read poems of Merwin’s to bring his voice into the Muir House.  As is the tradition, a select few of Alhambra’s poets will participate as well.

Reservations are required. To make a reservation, please call (925) 228-8860.