Glen Arbor Arts Center hosts poet Jen Steinorth
From staff reports
“Coffee With The Authors” is a live, conversational interview with local and regional authors about the craft and process of writing. On Aug. 18 Traverse City poet and teacher Jennifer Sperry Steinorth discusses Her Read, a book-length collage poem. In the tradition of reusing canvases, Steinorth appropriates a seminal text, The Meaning of Art by Herbert Read (Faber & Faber, 1931), and with the liberal use of correction fluid, scalpel and embroidery floss, erases and transforms the book from art criticism into feminist verse. Sarah Bearup-Neal, GAAC gallery manager, leads the conversation. The interview begins at 1 pm.
Read’s 1931 book, a survey of Western art history, is notable for the complete absence of any women artists in the text. Steinorth addresses Read’s erasure through erasure poetry, a poetic form in which a poet blacks out or in some way erases words from a preexisting source to create new poems. Steinorth is the author of three published books of poetry, numerous broadsides, handmade books and more. She is a lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a 2023-2024 Beinecke Fellow at Yale where she is at work on a biography of American poet, C.D. Wright.
This Coffee With The Authors interview is part of the GAAC’s Shrines + Altars project, an exploration of what, where, and how we direct our worshipful attention – secular, non-secular, sacred, and profane. Read more about Shrines + Altars at GlenArborArt.org /EXHIBITS. Coffee With The Authors is offered without charge. The program is supported by the Cottage Book Shop and the Glen Lake Community Library. The GAAC is located at 6031 S. Lake St., Glen Arbor.