Indie Lit Kickoff Reading featuring Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven’s The Flight from Meaning (Slant Books, 2025) was a finalist for the International Beverly Prize for Literature. He has three earlier poetry collections: The Last Sacred Place in North America, selected by T.R. Hummer as winner of the New American Poetry Prize; Dust and Bread, winner of the Ohio Poet of the Year award; and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks, runner-up for the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry in the last year Levine served as judge. Together with Wang Shouyi, Li Yongyi, and Jin Zhong, he published the 300-page, dual language (Mandarin and English) anthology of collaborative translations, Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields: Poems from Contemporary China (Twelve Winters Press, 2021). His memoir about childhood in New York's industrial Mohawk Valley, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life Along the Mohawk, was published by Syracuse University Press in 2008.