Rick Barot: Online

Rachel McCauley

Poetry Icon

Poetry

Rick Barot: Online

Past Event: Friday, May 15, 2020

At lectures.org

Listen to Podcast

This event will be streamed online—click the “Learn More” button to see details. Rick Barot is the award-winning author of Chord, Want, and The Darker Fall. His latest book of poems, The Galleons (2020), is in part about the centuries-long colonial structure that sustained Spanish control over Latin and South America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines.

About the online format: We are happy to say that we will be able to stream Rick Barot’s event online, enabling you to hear his poetry from the safety of your home. Rick’s reading will only be available to ticket holders, streamed digitally on lectures.org, at the original date and time of his event. The event will also be available online for a week afterwards, so you can hit the “pause” button and return to it at your leisure. Closer to the event, we will send ticket holders a password they will use to access his event with further instructions.

We are also excited to announce that the Q&A portion of the evening, moderated by Jane Wong, the author of Overpour, will be FREE and open to the public on lectures.org.

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and emigrated to the San Francisco Bay area when he was ten years old. He partially attributes his love of the written word to his youth spent enjoying the public library system and independent book stores in Oakland. Barot earned a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He was both a Stegner Fellow in Poetry and a Jones Lecturer of Poetry at Stanford University.

After spending some time writing non-fiction, Barot discovered poetry was truly his “home genre.” He loves the expansive possibility of imagery, metaphor, and rhythm. He often talks about the alchemic power of writing, how with the proper craft and care, writers can turn ordinary words into something charged with immense value.

Barot’s work includes The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), and Chord (2015). Barot’s poems and essays have appeared in the New Republic, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Tin House, The New York Times Magazine, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Barot recently achieved one of the items on his writing bucket list: having one of his poems from The Galleons published in The New Yorker.

Barot lives in Tacoma, Washington, where he is the poetry editor of the New England Review and the director of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA through Pacific Lutheran University. Barot was on the faculty of the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and has taught at Breadloaf Writing Conference. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Barot received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry for The Darker the Fall. Barot won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards with his book, Want. Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize.

Jane Wong, who will be moderating the Q&A portion of Barot’s event, is the author of Overpour from Action Books, and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, 4Culture, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Willapa Bay AiR, Hedgebrook, the Jentel Foundation, SAFTA, and Mineral School. In 2017, she received the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist award for Washington artists. A scholar of Asian American poetry and poetics, you can explore “The Poetics of Haunting” project here.

Event Details

lectures.org

Know Before You Go

How do I access the online event?

Two days before Rick Barot’s online event, we will email all ticket holders the special link and passcode to access his reading. We will also send another email the day of his reading for later ticket buyers, containing the same information. If you have opted out of receiving SAL emails, you will miss this important information—please email us at boxoffice@lectures.org and we will assist you.

Have a question for the speaker?

Ticket holders, watch for an email that will give you information on how to send in your Q&A questions.

Books

Poetry Series and Create-Your-Own-Series subscribers, General level and up, receive a copy of The Galleons. We are happy to announce that we will be shipping these books to your homes shortly.

If you don’t already own books by Rick Barot, we recommend you purchase them online from Open Books, our bookstore partner for this evening.

Accessibility

Closed Captioning is an option for people who have hearing loss, where captioning displays the words that are spoken or sung at the bottom of the video. Captioning is available for all online events; click the “CC” button to view captions during the event.

Sign Language Interpretation is available upon request for Deaf, DeafBlind, and hard of hearing individuals at online events. To make a request for ASL interpretation, please contact us at boxoffice@lectures.org or 206.621.2230×10, or select Sign Language Interpretation from the Accessibility section during your ticket checkout process, and we will reach out to you to confirm details. Please note: we appreciate a two-week advance notice to allow us time to secure interpretation.

We are pleased to offer these accessibility services for online events, and they are provided at no additional cost to ticket holders. Please contact us with any questions and feedback about how we can be more accessible and inclusive. Our Patron Services Manager is available at boxoffice@lectures.org, or Monday-Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. at 206.621.2230×10. For more accessibility information, please head to lectures.org/accessibility.

Sponsors

Poetry Series Sponsor
Charles B. & Barbara Wright