440 Gallery is excited to welcome you to a night of poetry with Cindy Savett, Celia Bland and Jonathan Blunk. The singular American poet Jean Valentine left us in December 2020. All three poets had the good fortune to know Jean as a teacher and a friend. Each will begin their reading with a poem of Valentine’s in honor of her enduring work and wonderful spirit.
Cindy Savett is the author of Child in the Road (Parlor Press), The Breath (BlazeVOX ) and the chapbooks: The Story of my Eyes, Battle for the Metal Kiss, Rachel: In the Temporary Mist of Prayer, and Overtures of Survival. Her work is also found in the anthology, Challenges for the Delusional. Cindy is published widely in both print and online journals. Educated at The Baldwin School, she attended Gratz College and The University of Pennsylvania where she examined the works of Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger, under the tutelage of Van A. Harvey, Laurence J. Silberstein and Victor M. Lidz. The sudden death of her youngest daughter generated a fierce reckoning in her poems. As a result, for the past two decades Cindy’s poetry has focused on the experience of grief from various perspectives, including that of her deceased child. Her work has evolved into an investigation into the nature of the “I” when it encounters the “Other”. Cindy continues to lead poetry workshops for psychiatric inpatients at several area hospitals.
Celia Bland’s third collection of poetry, Cherokee Road Kill, was published in 2018. She lives on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and is a faculty associate and administrator at the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking.
Jonathan Blunk is a poet, essayist, and audio producer. His authorized biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry (FSG 2017), earned wide praise. He is working on a sequence of poems inspired by Juan Gris’s life and paintings.