Former Poet Laureate of Boston to Speak at Middlesex CC

~Submitted by Middlesex Community College

Middlesex Community College will host poet Danielle Legros Georges as part of the college’s Visiting Writers Series at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, October 19 in the Bedford Campus Café East.

“As an educator and practicing creative writer, I draw on the theoretical frameworks and approaches of the arts traditions, and feel they allow us to experience different perspectives in powerful ways,” Georges said. “The arts allow students to appreciate and reconsider boundaries of identity, culture, and perceived or understood ability.”

The 2015 to 2019 Poet Laureate of Boston, Georges is a Professor of Creative Writing at Lesley University. She has been awarded several honors, including the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships, a MASS MoCA Fellowship, and a PEN/Heim Translation Grant.

“I see creative writing as a powerful tool for inquiry, reflection and knowing,” Georges said. “And art practice as a way to enhance critical engagement and the development of valuable critical skills.”

Georges is the author of three collections of poetry, “Maroon” (Curbstone Books, 2001), “The Dear Remote Nearness of You” (Barrow Street Press, 2016), and a book of translations “Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert” (Subpress Collective, 2021), which was the winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. She also wrote the chapter book “Letters from Congo” (Central Square Press, 2017).

Her poems have also appeared in a number of literary journals. These include Agni, Callaloo, Poiesis, Black Renaissance Noire, Ibbetson Street, Salamander, and The American Poetry Review. Georges’ works were featured in the anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby in 2019, and she edited City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems for the City of Boston in 2017.

MCC Visiting Writers Series is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Office of Student Engagement.

“I feel that art allows for complexity in the complex world we all inhabit,” Georges said.