Join us for our second headline reading of the Festival, featuring Lang Leav and Dara Wier, with an opening reading by National Youth Poet Laureate Meera Dasgupta.
Link to recording: https://salemstate.zoom.us/rec/share/Sd3tK17J_SReWufeOxKKB_yDl9rMxYwflxl_52cfWxs7_04mPjELflcxA_amtj5v.y51fmueFpSzx7fCH?startTime=1621033339000Meera Dasgupta is the youngest United States Youth Poet Laureate appointed in the history of the country. She is also the first U.S. Youth Poet Laureate to have been appointed from New York (as well as the Northeastern region) and the first Asian-American Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, a program pioneered by Urban Word NYC.
Born in Queens, she is a fierce advocate for student voice and gender equality, having worked throughout the city on various projects in order to empower young women and to increase civic engagement within other students her age. A Van Lier Fellow, Federal Hall Fellow, Climate Speaks Winner, & Scholastic Arts and Writing Winner, she has performed at the Appollo Theater, the Rotary Peace Fellowship Alumni Association’s inaugural Global Cyber Peace Conference, the United State of Young Women, and more. Meera has facilitated poetry workshops for Apple, been featured in Poets & Writers Magazine, and has been profiled in a New York City ad campaign for her work around climate advocacy. Meera is presently a senior at Stuyvesant High School and hopes to continue to utilize the intersection between social justice and poetry to uplift the voices of historically underrepresented communities.
Novelist and poet
Lang Leav was born in a refugee camp when her family were fleeing the Khmer Rouge Regime. She spent her formative years in Sydney, Australia, in the predominantly migrant town of Cabramatta. Among her many achievements, Lang is the winner of a Qantas Spirit of Youth Award, Churchill Fellowship and Goodreads Reader’s Choice Award.
Her first book,
Love & Misadventure (2013) was a breakout success, and her subsequent poetry books have all been international bestsellers. In 2016, Lang turned her attention to fiction, and her debut novel
Sad Girls shot to #1 on the
Straits Times and other bestseller charts internationally.
Lang actively participates in international writers' festivals and her tours consistently draw massive crowds. With a combined social media following of two million, Lang’s message of love, loss, and female empowerment continues to resonate with her multitude of readers.
Lang has been featured on CNN, SBS Australia, Intelligence Squared UK, Radio New Zealand, and in various publications, including
Vogue,
Newsweek, the
Straits Times, the
Guardian, and the
New York Times. She currently resides in New Zealand with her partner and fellow author, Michael Faudet.
Dara Wier's books include
In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017),
You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013),
Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009),
Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006),
Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005; 2006 Poetry Center Book Award),
Hat On a Pond (Verse Press, 2002), and
Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001). Among her works are limited editions
THRU (Scram, 2020),
(X In Fix) in
Rain Taxi’s Brainstorm Series,
Fly on the Wall (Oat City Press), and
The Lost Epic, co-written with James Tate (Waiting for Godot Books, 1999). Fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center have supported her poems. Her editing work includes publishing limited edition chapbooks and broadsides for Factory Hollow Press. Forthcoming is
Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina from Wave Books.
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