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World Poetry Salon VII:
Forrest Gander, Zelda and Georgia b. Smith, and Patricio Ferrari
Experience words and music from around the globe at the World Poetry Salon, a new series presented in partnership with Limelight Poetry, a local nonprofit dedicated to promoting world poetry. Each event features readings by a celebrated poet set to live music by a musician of the same cultural background.
This salon will feature a reading by poet Forrest Gander accompanied by dancers Zelda and Georgia B. Smith. A printout will be available for attendees to follow along with Gander's poetry during the reading. Following the reading, Gander will be interviewed by event host Patricio Ferrari.
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Forrest Gander
The author of twenty books of his own and as many books of translations, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert. He has degrees in geology and literature. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, Gander has been a signal voice for environmental poetics. His latest books are Mojave Ghost and the translation, Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems of Jeannette L. Clariond. A novel, The Weight of a Frozen Moment and a selected poems, Dune Lines, are forthcoming in April 2027.
“Nikola Madzirov is one of the finest poets in Europe today! I admire his genius on every page of his poetry book. He is a visionary, a true poet whom all poetry lovers in the world should know. ”
Charles Simic
“Madzirov's poems are like Expressionist paintings: filled with thick, energetic streaks they seem to emerge from the imagination and to return to it right away, like night animals caught in the headlights of a car. “We are the remnants of another age” — Nikola Madzirov succeeds in convincing us. ”
Adam Zagajewski
“Nikola Madzirov's poems seem to spring from elsewhere in time, reflective of a preternaturally wise and attentive sensibility. As we read these poems, they begin to inhabit us, and we are the better for having opened ourselves to them. Madzirov is a rare soul and a true poet.”
Carolyn Forché
“I liked Madzirov's poetry immensely, its candour, its invention, its darkness. It is like discovering a new planet in the solar system of the imagination!”
Mark Strand
POET
Georgia b. Smith
Georgia b. Smith is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in dance and architectural fabrication. She was a former member of the dance company Leimay, premiering "Borders" at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Georgia b.'s “Polite Structures,” a performance in which dancers are augmented with custom prosthetics, has been staged in Berlin, Prague, and Amsterdam. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan. Since then her work has been exhibited by the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan, Gallery 495 in NYC, Under the Roof in London, Kentucky School of Art and Design, and the University of Tokyo in Japan among other places. In 2024 Georgia b. developed a collaborative body of kinetic light -works with designer Brecht Wright Gander exhibited at Design Miami. Georgia b. and Zelda Smith’s collaborative work won “Best in Show” at Artificial Horizons, a robotic-art show in Detroit. Georgia b Smith was a Visiting Artist at Lehigh University as well as SUNY Oneonta in 2025. There she began to develop her latest collaboration with Zelda Smith, Uncanny Bodies. Georgia b Smith was on the short list for the Creative Capital grant this past cycle.
Interdisciplinary artist
Zelda Smith
Raised in the rural northeast, she comes from long sweeping stretches of rich black farmland and bare uncovered earth. A place tied to the notion of turnover and cycles of resilience stemming from and yielding back into the soil. Perhaps it is not entirely unexpected, then, that the earth has come to be one of the signature materials of her work.
She received my BFA in 2012 from Alfred University and my MFA in 2018 from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she concentrated in temporal sculpture. In the in-between, she spent three years at the Cal-Earth Institute, training to make sustainable housing and earth architecture.
Most recently, she has been a visiting artist at Lehigh University with her collaborator, Georgia b Smith. Together, they co-taught and developed a soft robotics course: Introduction to Wearable Soft Robotics. They were both Artist is Residence at SUNY Oneonta and were on the creative capital short list.
Interdisciplinary artist
Patricio Ferrari
Patricio Ferrari (polyglot poet, translator, editor) was born in Buenos Aires and left home at sixteen, when he began a lifelong journey across continents and languages. He has since shaped a multilingual poetics that explores belonging, displacement, and the in-between. In 2025, he was awarded the Fence Modern Poets Series Prize for Mud Songs, the first volume of Elsehere, a trilogy charting how each language molds and reveals a different facet of the self—what he calls heterophony, the process of self-othering through an adopted tongue.
HOST
Latest Recap
World Poetry Salon VI
Cecilia Vicuña, Ricardo Gallo, and Patricio Ferrari
Photo by Tianyun Chen，Shengxuan Yu，Ruoyun Chen & Jonathan Blanc/The New York Public Library