Aaron Shurin and Robert Glück, 75th birthday reading & celebration

• This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.
   
• Masks are required for those attending in person.

Co-presented by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade, with thanks to our generous host, McRoskey Mattress Co. 

Our friends and fellow poets Aaron Shurin and Robert Glück each turn 75 this year, and we're putting on a little celebratory reading and evening in their honor. Both are also alums of The Poetry Center, and have been teachers and mentors to dozens of younger poets and writers across the years. Please join us to celebrate their collective anniversary. 

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute (Nightboat, 2020), Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), and The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2015). A pioneer in both LGBTQ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. He has written numerous critical essays about poetic theory and compositional practice, as well as personal narratives on sexual identity, gender fluidity, and the AIDS epidemic. He is the former Associate Director of the Poetry Center at SFSU. A longtime educator, he’s the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Robert Glück’s poetry collections include Reader; La Fontaine, a collaboration with Bruce Boone; In Commemoration of the Visit, a collaboration with Kathleen Fraser; and Parables, a collaboration with the Cuban artist, José Angel Toirac. Roof Books will publish Glück’s long poem, I, Boombox, in 2023. His fiction includes the story collections Denny Smith and Elements, and the novels Jack the Modernist and Margery Kempe, which was republished in 2020 by NYRB Classics. An excerpt from his latest novel, About Ed, appeared this summer in The Paris Review. Glück edited, with Camille Roy, Mary Berger, and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative, and his collected essays, Communal Nude, was published by Semiotext(e) in 2016. Glück served as director of San Francisco State’s The Poetry Center, co-director of Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and associate editor at Lapis Press. He lives in San Francisco.