Metro Rhythm will be kicking off the new year with a very special reading on Friday, January 27, at 7:30 p.m. As always, the event will be held at Blue Angel Wines in Williamsburg, and it is free and open to the public.

Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Strand will read to launch his new collection of prose poems, Almost Invisible. And alongside him will be four recent or current MFA students: John James, Lizzie Harris, JC Longbottom, and Hilary Dobel.

It promises to be a very exciting night and a major event in the poetry calendar for 2012! You won’t want to miss it.

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Mark Strand is the author of thirteen books of poems. He is also the author of a book of stories and three volumes of translations, and the editor of a number of anthologies (including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century). He has received many honors and awards for his poems, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize (for Blizzard of One), the Bollingen Prize, and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1990 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. He teaches at Columbia University.

John James holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University, where he received an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review, DIAGRAM, Washington Square, and elsewhere. He teaches at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky.

Lizzie Harris was born on the Tohono O’odham reservation in southern Arizona and was raised on Pennsylvania’s coasts. She currently teaches creative writing to returning veterans. She lives in Gowanus.

Nothing annoys JC Longbottom so much as someone who arrives in a shabby, poorly decorated carriage.

Hilary Dobel was born and raised in Seattle, and her mother still wishes she wore less flannel. Her poetry most recently appeared in Lana Turner and is forthcoming in next winter’s Ploughshares, and she is currently working on a translation of Juan José Saer’s novel, The Clouds. She lives in a nebulously-defined area of New York known as Morningside Heights.

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We’ll see you on the 27th. Don’t forget to RSVP on Facebook!