Boston Court Performing Arts Center is dedicated to presenting works that are creative, bold, and daring. They strive to challenge the audiences of Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley with diverse programs in an intimate setting. Boston Court presents Red Hen Press on March 7, 2011 for an amazing night of verse with poets John Barr, Charles Harper Webb, and Rae Armantrout.

John Barr’s poems have appeared in many magazines, and have been published in six collections: The War Zone (1989), Natural Wonders (1991), The Dial Painters (1994), Centennial Suite (1998), all by Warwick Press; and The Hundred Fathom Curve (1997), and Grace (1999), by Story Line Press. Barr is President Emeritus of the Poetry Society of America, has taught in the Graduate Writing Program of Sarah Lawrence College, and was appointed in 2004 the first president of The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. His latest book, The Hundred Fathom Curve: New and Selected Poems was published by Red Hen Press in 2011.

Charles Harper Webb was a rock guitarist for fifteen years and is now a licensed psychotherapist and professor at Cal State University, Long Beach. He has written five books of poetry, including Liver, which won the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize, and Reading the Water, which won the S.F. Morse Poetry Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His manuscript, Amplified Dog, won the 2005 Benjamin Saltman Award, and is published by Red Hen Press.

Rae Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California, in 1947, and grew up in San Diego. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Denise Levertov, and a master’s degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She has published numerous books of poetry, including: Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009), which earned Aramantrout the Pulitzer Prize in 2010; Next Life, (2007), selected by the New York Times as one of the most notable books of 2007; Up to Speed (2004), a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Poetry; Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001), also a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award; The Pretext (2001); Made To Seem (1995); and The Invention of Hunger (1979).