Join us as we continue the tradition of summer poetry readings from the rooftops. This outdoor reading series is held on the newly renovated rooftop of the Arsenal Building in Central Park, and features new and emerging poets.

Ken Chen’s debut collection, Juvenilia, was selected for the 2009 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Yale University Press, 2010). His work has been published or recognized in Best American Essays 2006, Best American Essays 2007, and The Boston Review of Books. He is a former editor of Arts & Letters Daily, which he helped found in 1998, and in 2002, he established the monthly arts magazine Satellite. Chen is a graduate of Yale Law School, and he is the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Idra Novey's debut collection The Next Country received the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books and was released in 2008. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her recent translations include the selected poems of Brazilian writer Manoel de Barros and a novel by Emilio Lascano Tegui, On Elegance While Sleeping, both forthcoming in fall 2010. She currently directs the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and NYU.

Lisa Sewell is the author of two books of poems: The Way Out (Alice James Books, 1998) and Name Withheld (Four Way Books, 2006). She is also co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan, 2007). She has received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Recent work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, New Letters, Tampa Review, Laurel Review, The Journal and Colorado Review. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches in the English department at Villanova University.