Conservancy News

The Merwin Conservancy Welcomes MacArthur Fellow Lewis Hyde &
Poet Matthew Zapruder to Hawai‘i for two Appearances in The Green Room 

“Lewis Hyde is one of our true superstars of nonfiction.” – David Foster Wallace

“Matthew Zapruder has a “razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture.”
– Dana Jennings, The New York Times

On Wednesday, December 5th  in Honolulu and Thursday, December 6th, 2018 on Maui, The Merwin Conservancy will present two intimate evenings with with Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, MacArthur Fellow and scholar in conversation with Matthew Zapruder, poet, translator and former poetry editor of The New York Times in The Green Room, an environmental and literary salon series that is hosted by the Conservancy and fosters a reverence for language, nature, and imagination in the community. 

The duo will share excerpts of their own writing along with the work of those who have inspired them (including poetry by Conservancy founder W.S. Merwin), and engage in spontaneous conversation examining the nature of creativity.

The event on the 5th takes place at the Doris Duke Theatre in partnership with the Honolulu Museum of Art on O‘ahu, and the event on the 6th will be at the McCoy Studio Theater at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center on Maui. Both events begin at 7pm.

For tickets and more event information, visit these links:

• Wednesday, December 5th: Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu, O‘ahu)
• Thursday, December 6th, Maui Arts & Cultural Center (Kahului, Maui)

“The Merwin Conservancy is excited to host this exploration of creative life, in all its complex, intricate, surprising dimensions,” said Sonnet Coggins, the Conservancy’s Executive Director. “I couldn’t dream up more passionate and knowledgeable guides than Lewis Hyde and Matthew Zapruder. Their writing, both about the creative process and born of it, has shifted our understanding of what creativity makes possible.”

The Honolulu event is made possible by a partnership with the Honolulu Museum of Art, and with additional support from Halekulani Hotel.  The Maui event is presented by FIM Group. The overall series is supported by  Atherton Family Foundation. Proceeds from the event The Merwin Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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About Lewis Hyde
Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes the World (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. Hyde’s most recent book, Common as Air, is a spirited defense of our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich in the present. He is currently at work on A Primer for Forgetting, an exploration of the situations in which forgetfulness is more useful than memory. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is an Associate of Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center.

ABOUT MATTHEW ZAPRUDER
Poet, editor, and translator Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear (2014), as well as Why Poetry (2017), a book of prose about reading poetry for a general audience. His second poetry collection, The Pajamaist, won the 2007 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. An Associate Professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor at large at Wave Books, and from 2016-7 held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine.

About The Green Room
The Green Room is a literary salon series steeped in the values of The Merwin Conservancy—which include a reverence for nature, language, art and imagination. Launched in 2013, The Green Room presents writers, poets, artists, botanists, and environmentalists –from both Hawai’i and off-island – to create enriching, meaningful salons that spark conversation, community engagement and artistic expression. Events are now held 6 times per year, roughly every other month, on Maui at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center, and on O‘ahu at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Past events have included presentations by Tracy K. Smith, Bill McKibben, Billy Collins, Edward Hirsch, Michael Wiegers, Pualani Kanaka‘ole Kanahele, Alexis Rockman, Susan Middleton, Cathy Song, Hope Jahren, Bill Porter aka Red Pine, William Finnegan, Michael Ondaatje, Gary Paul Nabhan, Jane Hirshfield, David Grubin, Susan Casey, Barry Lopez, Naomi Shihab Nye, Terry Tempest Williams, and Dr. Abraham Verghese. For more information, visit: www.merwinconservancy.org/the-green-room.