World Poetry Salon: An Evening of Poetry & Dance with Forrest Gander

Join The New York Public Library and Limelight Poetry at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL) for a World Poetry Salon event!

Experience words and music from around the globe at the World Poetry Salon, a new series presented in partnership with Limelight Poetry, a local nonprofit dedicated to promoting world poetry. Each event features readings by a celebrated poet set to live music by a musician of the same cultural background. 

This salon will feature a reading by poet Forrest Gander, ccompanied by dancer Nola Sporn Smith, who will be performing work choreographed by Zelda and Georgia b Smith. A printout will be available for attendees to follow along with Gander's poetry during the reading. Following the reading, Gander will be interviewed by event host Patricio Ferrari.

To join in person | Please be sure to register for an In-Person Ticket. Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins.

For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. If you register for multiple tickets, please provide the name of each person who will be attending the event or arrive with your entire party present. Only registered patrons will be granted entry into the event space. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program.

To join online | On the day of the event, registrants will receive a Youtube link to join the program. To receive an email reminder shortly in advance of the event, please be sure to register! If you encounter any issues, please join us on NYPL's YouTube channel.

ABOUT LIMELIGHT POETRY

Limelight Poetry, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating and promoting world poetry, was founded in New York City in 2024 by poet Wang Yin. Bringing outstanding poets and artists from around the globe to the city, it creates innovative cross-disciplinary experiences—with a particular commitment to poetry in underrepresented languages. Drawing on New York's rich cultural landscape, Limelight Poetry connects poetry with music, the visual arts, dance, and performance, fostering global dialogue through the power of poetry.

ABOUT THE POET

The author of twenty books of his own and as many books of translations, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert. He has degrees in geology and literature. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, Gander has been a signal voice for environmental poetics. His latest books are Mojave Ghost and the translation, Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems of Jeannette L. Clariond. A novel, The Weight of a Frozen Moment and a selected poems, Dune Lines, are forthcoming in April 2027.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Georgia b. Smith is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in dance and architectural fabrication. She was a former member of the dance company Leimay, premiering "Borders" at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Georgia b.'s “Polite Structures,” a performance in which dancers are augmented with custom prosthetics, has been staged in Berlin, Prague, and Amsterdam. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan. Since then her work has been exhibited by the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan, Gallery 495 in NYC, Under the Roof in London, Kentucky School of Art and Design, and the University of Tokyo in Japan among other places. In 2024 Georgia b. developed a collaborative body of kinetic light -works with designer Brecht Wright Gander exhibited at Design Miami. Georgia b. and Zelda Smith’s collaborative work won “Best in Show” at Artificial Horizons, a robotic-art show in Detroit. Georgia b Smith was a Visiting Artist at Lehigh University as well as SUNY Oneonta in 2025. There she began to develop her latest collaboration with Zelda Smith, Uncanny Bodies. Georgia b Smith was on the short list for the Creative Capital grant this past cycle.

Raised in the rural northeast, Zelda Smith comes from long sweeping stretches of rich black farmland and bare uncovered earth. A place tied to the notion of turnover and cycles of resilience stemming from and yielding back into the soil. Perhaps it is not entirely unexpected, then, that the earth has come to be one of the signature materials of her work. She received my BFA in 2012 from Alfred University and my MFA in 2018 from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she concentrated in temporal sculpture. In the in-between, she spent three years at the Cal-Earth Institute, training to make sustainable housing and earth architecture. Most recently, she has been a visiting artist at Lehigh University with her collaborator, Georgia b Smith. Together, they co-taught and developed a soft robotics course: Introduction to Wearable Soft Robotics. They were both Artist is Residence at SUNY Oneonta and were on the creative capital short list.

ABOUT THE DANCER

Nola is a dance and theater artist from Brooklyn, NY. Nola was nominated for a Bessie Outstanding Performer Award for her work with Stacy Grossfield, who she has performed with since 2016. She has also recently worked with Amanda Szeglowski/cakeface, Kim Brandt, Luciana Acuna and Alejo Moguillansky (Buenos Aires) and others: and performs with the band Dead Tooth. She teaches all-levels dance and fitness classes at the Woods in Ridgewood, Queens, an affordable rehearsal space for artists that she co-directs.

ABOUT THE HOST

Patricio Ferrari (polyglot poet, translator, editor) was born in Buenos Aires and left home at sixteen, when he began a lifelong journey across continents and languages. He has since shaped a multilingual poetics that explores belonging, displacement, and the in-between. In 2025, he was awarded the Fence Modern Poets Series Prize for Mud Songs, the first volume of Elsehere, a trilogy charting how each language molds and reveals a different facet of the self—what he calls heterophony, the process of self- othering through an adopted tongue.

BOOKS AND MORE

If you have an NYPL library card, you can borrow e-books related to this event on your favorite devices. Learn more: nypl.org/ebookhelp.

Don't have a New York Public Library card? Get one here!

ACCESSIBILITY

In-Person

• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email [email protected].


• This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

Online

• Live captioning will be provided.


• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email [email protected].

CONNECT

For general questions, please email [email protected].

Please submit all press inquiries at least 48 hours before the event: email [email protected].