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TORY DENT - FALL 2002 FEATURE  

The Cortland Review

FEATURE

Tory Dent
An interview and reading with New York Poet Tory Dent. Grace Cavalieri hosts this one hour program of transformation.

R.T. Smith
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James Reidel
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Robert Kendall
A Day In The Life: Epistemological sit-ups and perception stretches.

John Kinsella
You and I—blackout: Cambridge, mushrooms, anarchy, and teetotalling, all in the final installment of John Kinsella's autobiographical series.

Tory Dent

Tory Dent is the author of HIV, Mon Amour (Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), which won the 1999 James Laughlin Award and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and What Silence Equals (Persea Books, 1993). Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer�s Award; and three PEN American Center Grants for Writers with AIDS. Her poetry has appeared in periodicals such as Agni, Antioch Review, Kalliope, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Pequod, Ploughshares, Fence, and others, as well as the anthologies Life Sentences (1994), The Exact Change Yearbook (1995), In the Company of my Solitude (1995), and Things Shaped in Passing (1997). An essay entitled "The Deferred Dream," an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress, Many Rivers to Cross, appeared in the collection Bearing Life: Women�s Writings on Childlessness (ed. Rochelle Ratner, The Feminist Press, 2001). Tory Dent has also written art criticism for magazines including Arts, Flash Art, and Parachute, as well as catalogue essays for art exhibitions. She lives in New York City and Maine.
Tory Dent on The Poet and The Poem

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Grace Cavalieri talks with Tory Dent 
 

Tory Dent with husband Sean Harvey

The second program in a six-part series is a remote interview/ reading with poet Tory Dent who is dying of (living with) AIDS. Tory Dent was named a "Witter Bynner Fellow in Poetry" by the Library of Congress. The program is technically excellent and not distracting as a phone conversation. This is the most inspiring powerful program one could hear. Tory is a brilliant poet and a strong spirit. She speaks of the creative process under the most restrictive of human conditions. She talks about the disease and her view of the dilemma in this country. This is not at all a sad show; in fact it is alive with wisdom and strength. Tory has two books in print: What Silence Equals, and HIV, Mon Amour. She reads several poems from each and discusses her ability and persistence to write, even under the present conditions.

Listen to the program
(requires Real Player)


Producer: Grace Cavalieri, Forest Woods Media Productions, Inc.


Grace Cavalieri is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Cuffed Frays (Argonne Hotel Press, 2001), and numerous produced plays, including Pinecrest Rest Haven (Word Works, 1998), which premiered at the Common Basis Theatre in New York, 2001. She has also written texts and lyrics for opera, stage, and film. Producer/host of public radio's "The Poet and the Poem" weekly from 1977 to 1997, presenting 2000 poets to the nation, she now produces the series annually from the Library of Congress via NPR satellite. The recipient of awards that include the PEN Fiction Award, The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Silver Medal as well as others which honor her "significant contribution to poetry" and distinguish her as an exceptional woman, she is part of the poetry faculty at St. Mary's College of Southern Maryland and teaches workshops nationwide. She and her husband, sculptor Kenneth Flynn, live in West Virginia. They have four grown daughters.

 

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� 2002 The Cortland Review