After Moby~Dick: An Anthology of New Poetry Book Launching & Signing; Meet the Authors, June 21-22

Spinner Publications is pleased to announce the release of a new book, After Moby-Dick: An Anthology of New Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Schultz and Kylan Rice. To celebrate its release, there will be two “Meet the Authors” events on the weekend of June 21–22.

An initial book launch and signing will be held on Friday, June 21, at New Bedford Whaling Museum, 18. Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford, and will include readings by editor Schultz and Rice, as well as by featured poets, Everett Hoagland and Laurie Robertson-Laurent. On Saturday, June 22, an author-signing will take place in Westport at Partner’s Village Store.

After Moby-Dick is an anthology that includes sixty-one poems—all written since 2000 by contemporary American poets. All works in the collection are inspired by Melville’s seafaring epic novel, Moby-Dick; and two of the featured authors are New Bedford poets previously published by Spinner—Laurie Robertson Lorant, author of The Man Who Lived Among the Cannibals, and former New Bedford Poet Laureate, Everett Hoagland, author of This City and Other Poems, and Ocean Voices: An Anthology of Ocean Poems.

“To read After Moby-Dick is to experience Melville’s novel through the voices of mariners, renegades, and castaways, women and whales, through the pages of books and planks of a ship’s deck. It is to find Moby-Dick in paint, in teeth, in skin, in the heart. This book is breath-taking and breath-giving. Read it often.” – Wyn Kelley: Melville’s City (1996), Herman Melville: An Introduction (2008)

In assembling After Moby-Dick, the editors conducted a search for 21st-century poetry inspired by Melville’s novel. In response, poets submitted more than 100 poems, and the editors selected representations from thirty-four poets—a stunning and memorable result. Besides Hoagland and Robinson-Lorant, other nationally-known poets include Dan Beachy-Quick, Susan Howe, Jeffrey Yang, Rachel Richardson, and Jessica Cuello.

Co-editor Elizabeth Schultz is an esteemed Melville scholar with two critically-acclaimed books on Melville—“Unpainted to the Last”: Moby-Dick and American Art, and editor of Melville and Women—and has published five books of poetry and a memoir. She is a professor emerita of University of Kansas, a past president of the Melville Society, and a founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Co-editor Kylan Rice is a published poet and Ph.D. graduate student in English at the University of North Carolina. Kylan is an active member of the Melville Society, lecturing at world conferences on the subject of Melville.

Spinner Publications, is a non-profit publishing house in New Bedford whose mission is to record and promote the history and culture of the cities and towns of southeastern New England.