MARCH 24, 7:30 – POETRY – KAREN MORRIS AND SALITA BRYANT

Karen Morris is a poet and psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan and Honesdale, PA. She is the recipient of the 2010 Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis for her article, which explores the participation of psychologists in the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, through the lens of classical Persian and Sufi poetry. She is an avid gardener and a student of Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging.

Salita Bryant holds a Ph.D. in literature and M.Ed. in Clinical Counseling from the University of MS and an MFA in poetry from NYU. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at Lehman College—CUNY and in Psychoanalytic Training with Harlem Family Institute. She has recently published a chapbook, Addie Bundren is Dead, Finishing Line Press (2011). She won Connecticut Poetry Society’s 2010 Award, and was first Runner-up in South Carolina Review 2010 contest. In 2009 she won Boulevard’s Emerging Poets Award, and was first runner-up in Alimentum’s Poetry Contest and in The MacGuffin Poetry Contest, as well, she was a finalist in the New Letters Poetry Award, Atlanta Review’s 2009 International Poetry Competition, Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition, and in the Third Coast Poetry Contest. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, and in 2005 won the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize, and the Iron Horse Literary Review Discovered Voices Award. She has recently been published in The Connecticut River Review, Agenda, Nimrod, Wind, Snake Nation Review, Dogwood, and The North American Review, among others. As well she is Associate Editor of the University of Georgia Press’s Liberties Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic.