President of The Poetry Foundation Reads Today

Robert Polito, award-winning writer and poet, and new president of The Poetry Foundation (which boasts an astounding $200 million endowment from philanthropist Ruth Lilly), will present a free reading as part of the New York State Summer Writers Institute tonight. He will share the stage with novelist Ann Beattie.

Polito is also director of the writing program at The New School in Manhattan, and a past winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his biography of pulp fiction writer Jim Thompson, Savage Art.

His latest book is the poetry-prose hybrid collection Hollywood and God (2013).

Here is the title poem, which starts "If only God would save me / I would know how to hurt you."

http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/own_words/page_1/

Full schedule of free readings:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sumread.html