Mónica de la Torre and Courtney Faye Taylor

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Poetry at Bennington welcomes Mónica de la Torre and Courtney Faye Taylor for a public reading of their poetry.

Mónica de la Torre is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat Books, 2020), and a translation of Defense of the Idol (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) by Chilean Modernist Omar Cáceres. She coedited the anthologies Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information, 2020) and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon, 2002). In 2022, she received the C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Born and raised in Mexico City, she came to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue an MFA and PhD in Spanish literature at Columbia University. A former editor for BOMB Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail, she teaches at Brooklyn College and Bard’s summer MFA program. 

Courtney Faye Taylor is the author of Concentrate (Graywolf Press, 2022), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and a finalist for the NAACP Image Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, the Society of Midland Authors Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award. The collection has been featured in Publishers Weekly, Essence Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times and named among the “Best Poetry of the Last Year” by Ms. Magazine. Individual poems have appeared in Georgia Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Her visual art has been exhibited at the Charlotte Street Foundation and The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art online. Winner of the 92Y Discovery Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize, she lives in Atlanta.