Tracy K. Smith, Carley Moore, and Fred Schmalz! Blue Letter Series at Watty & Meg 1 is free and open to the public: Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 8 p.m. through 9:30 p.m. at Watty & Meg restaurant, 248 Court Street between Baltic and Kane, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, NY. Nearest trains: F/G to Bergen Street or 4/5/R to Borough Hall.
Tracy K. Smith was raised in Northern California. She received degrees in English and Creative Writing from Harvard College and Columbia University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University from 1997-99. Her first collection of poems, The Body’s Question, was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Kevin Young, and published in 2003 by Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, and a 2005 Whiting Award. Her second collection, Duende, received the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was published by Graywolf Press in 2007. She has taught at the City University of New York, University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University.
Carley Moore grew up in Jamestown, a small city in upstate New York. The cold weather and gray days there made her a good listener, a music lover, and a writer for life.
Carley earned a B.A. from SUNY Binghamton, and an M.A. in Poetry and a Ph.D. in English Education from New York University. After completing a dissertation about teenage girl writers in Seventeen Magazine, she realized that instead of writing about teenage girls, she wanted to write of them and for them. She recently completed her first young adult novel, The Stalker Chronicles.
Carley is also a poet whose work has appeared in Coconut, Conduit, Fence, La Petite Zine, LIT, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She’s a full-time faculty member in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University, where she teaches writing. Carley lives with her husband Matt, her daughter Malka, and their two cats, Rudy and Lou—Lou’s a girl—in Brooklyn, New York.
Fred Schmalz’s work has appeared in A Public Space, 1111, Zoland Poetry, LUNGFULL!, Spinning Jenny, Conduit, jubilat, Handsome, The Blue Letter, We are so happy to know something and The Bedazzler from Wave Books. He was included in La Familia Americana, a bilingual anthology of new American poets published in Spain by Cosmopoetica in 2010. He is founding editor of swerve magazine. He lives in Kassel, Germany.
