Nina Shengold Reservoir Year

LISTEN to my November 10,, 2020 WIOX Radio conversation with writer and playwright Nina Shengold on her new book out this year from Syracuse University Press, Reservoir Year-A Walker’s Book of Days.  Nina Shengold's books include Clearcut (Anchor Books), a Book Sense Notable selection; River of Words: Portraits of Hudson Valley Writers (SUNY Press); and 14 theatre anthologies for Vintage Books and Viking Penguin.  Shengold won a Writers Guild Award for her teleplay Labor of Love and the ABC Playwright Award for Homesteaders.  She teaches creative writing at Vassar College. Shengold has profiled more than 150 writers for Chronogram, Poets & Writers, and Vassar Quarterly. She’s a founding member of the theatre company Actors & Writers, author series Word Café, and Hudson Valley Writers Resist. She was born in Brooklyn, grew up in New Jersey, escaped to Alaska, and now lives and works in the foothills of New York’s Catskill Mountains.  “Nina Shengold’s memoir explores a reservoir of feelings. Accompanied by her elegant, unpretentious prose, the reader comes upon surprises: a bear, an eagle feather, a crimson forest. Filled to the brim with subtle revelations, of sun-washed illuminations but also the poignant history; a drowned town lies below the shimmering surface. Expect to be moved, and then overcome by the tenderness and variety of Shengold’s emotional literary palette.” —Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country  Planet Poet’sPoet-At-Large, Pamela Manché Pearce talks about workshopping her poem “Black Iris” and reads the poem in its final, powerful version.