Solarities 3: Alice Notley, Hoa Nguyen, and Dale Martin Smith

Solarities is a poetry reading series bringing established and emerging visiting writers to Duke. For our third event, we welcome poets Alice Notley, Hoa Nguyen, and Dale Smith. 

Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California in the Mojave Desert.  She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and co-edited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. She edited the magazine CHICAGO in the 70s and co-edited with Oliver the magazines SCARLET and Gare du Nord in the 90s. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Ruth Lilly Prize, a lifetime achievement award. Notley may be most widely known for her epic poem The Descent of Alette. Recent books include The Speak Angel Series, Early Works, Telling the Truth As It Comes Up, and the forthcoming Being Reflected Upon.

Born in the lower Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington DC area, Hoa Nguyen is a poet and educator teaching writing and poetics at the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College and Toronto Metropolitan University. Her books include Red Juice, the Griffin Prize-nominated Violet Energy Ingots, and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, a finalist for the National Book Award and the General Governor’s Literary Award. She’s an Aquarius and a Fire Horse.

A poet and literary scholar, Dale Martin Smith was born in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of the full-length poetry collections Flying Red Horse (2021), Slow Poetry in America (2014), Black Stone (2007), American Rambler (2000), as well as the KFB chapbooks, Sons (2017), and Blur (2022). Smith’s scholarly contributions include Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (2012) and two edited editions, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson (both 2017). With Hoa Nguyen, he edited Skanky Possum, a literary zine and book imprint, 1998-2004. He is currently at work on an essay collection, ["That Tongue Be Time"], on the poetry and prosody of Norma Cole (2024).