Berkshire Festival of Women Artists: Hannah Fries Poetry Reading

Hannah Fries reading at the Women's Interfaith Institute

Poetry editor and associate editor Hannah Fries of Orion Magazine delighted her listeners with a series of poems about women like Noah’s wife, or the Oracle at Delphi, who have come down to us through history and myth as unnamed traces of women who lived, loved and left their mark.
In Hannah’s imagination, such women have been like spring bulbs planted beneath rocks, trying courageously but often fruitlessly to push their way up into the light.
Through her clear, powerful poetry, they found their way into the sunshine, and brought all of us with them.
If you’d like to read Hannah’s poem “Pygmalion’s Girl,” you can find it here at Mead Magazine.
reblogged from Berkshire Women Writers

"Noah's Wife":  Women at the Fringes of Faith

A poetry reading by Hannah Fries

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

5:45-8:45 pm

As part of the Berkshire Festival of Women Artists, Hannah Fries will present a poetry reading based on the stories of women characters from the Bible and mythology, from Noah's wife to Pygmalion's girl.  The poems are from the point of view of these characters, who often appear on the periphery of iconic stories, or who play central roles and yet have the little agency of their own; many do not even have names.

Hannah will discuss what drew her to imagine herself into these personas, and how giving voice to these women on the fringes -- and giving them a more gritty human complexity -- can provide refreshing new perspectives and entry points into old narratives.

Hannah Fries is associate editor and poetry editor of Orion magazine.  She grew up in New Hampshire, graduated from Dartmouth College and earned a MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.  She is the recipient of a residency with the Colorado Art Ranch and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Calyx, The Cortland Review, upstreet, and other journals.  She also serves on the board of The Frost Place—a Robert Frost Museum and poetry center in Franconia, NH.