Author Event! Rick Benjamin - In a Green Shade

Join us on Monday, 11/09/26 at 5:30 PM for an event with Former Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, Rick Benjamin. In A Green Shade is Rick Benjamin’s latest attempt to bring increased attention to connections between human and much-more-than-human worlds, in poem-snapshots that document both multi-cultural human and ecological realities, collapses of various kinds, as well as a visceral and vibrant sentience which can’t help sustaining itself. These poems link the local and mundane miracles of daily living to both the global and mystical possibilities that come with living on this planet “in the winters of this climate” (Adrienne Rich, from “Power”). Like Sharon Olds, but without her microscopic powers of observation, he has always longed to believe in what he is seeing. About the Author: Rick Benjamin (he/him) lives on unceded coastal Chumash land in Goleta, California, close to an ancient village that once sat on nearby bluffs, themselves now eroding, though slowly, into the Pacific. He can hear owls most nights in the old pines, and, after rains that come in hard and fast, deep throated toads singing again in the newly-made ponds. Though he has long-taught at colleges and universities, among them Brown, RISD, Goddard, Haverford and UCSB, as well as hundreds of elementary, middle and high schools, several community centers, youth and adult detention facilities, and Boys & Girls Clubs, his only current institutional affiliation is with an assisted living center based in Providence, Rhode Island, where he has been hosting and facilitating a bi-weekly poetry workshop for the past seventeen years, sometimes leaning into Zoom with his elders during the months he still finds himself in California. He served as state poet laureate of Rhode Island from 2012 – 2016. In a Green Shade is the latest of three books that he has published with Wayfarer Books, along with, most recently, The Mob Within the Heart and Some Bodies in the Grief Bed. His other books are Passing Love, Floating World, and Endless Distances. He divides his time, at least for the moment, between Goleta and Providence.