Poetry at Hygienic: LYUBOMIR LEVCHEV & TOM KIRLIN

We're proud to play host to not one but two world renowned poets for our October reading and highlighting new books from each. Lyubomir Levchev will read from 'Green-Winged Horse', a recent recipient of the William Meredith Award for Poetry, and Tom Kirlin reads from 'Under the Potato Moon'. Both books are published by Little Red Tree Publishing.

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LYUBOMIR LEVCHEV
Lyubomir Levchev was born in Troyan, Bulgaria, on April 27, 1935 and is regarded as one of the great poets of Eastern Europe with international renown. 
He has a long and distinguished history of commitment and service to literature and culture. He served as Chairman of the Bulgarian Writers’ Union (1979-1988), First Deputy Secretary of Culture of Bulgaria, and Editor-in-Chief of the literary weekly of the Bulgarian Writers’ Union, Literaturen Front. 
He is a member of the European Academy of Science, Art, and Culture, and the European Academy of Poetry.His many international awards include: the Gold Medal for Poetry of the French Academy and the honorary title of ‘Knight of Poetry’ from the French Government (1985); the Medal of the Venezuela Writers’ Association (1985); the Máté Zalka and Boris Polevoy awards, Russia (1986); the Grand Prize of the Alexander Pushkin Institute and the Sorbonne (1989); the Fernando Rielo World Prize for Mystical Poetry (1993); the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings, Macedonia (2010); the Bulgarian State Award Order of the Balkan Mountains 1st Class (2006). 
Levchev is the founder and editor of the International Literary Magazine Orpheus. He has over thirty poetry books and three novels published in Bulgarian. The latest two among those are the autobiographical novel Lament of the Dead Time (2011) and the collection of selected and new poems 77 Poems (2012). Over 58 of his books have been translated and published in 36 countries worldwide. 
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TOM KIRLIN
The author, a lapsed farmer and iambic fundamentalist, is a reluctant transcendentalist. Raised in Iowa, he ate rolled oats with horses, taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and studied on a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at Yale University. After moving to Washington, D.C., he won the Larry Neal Award for Poetry, received a grant from the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and studied at Bread Loaf. Following policy work on energy and the environment during a decade of UN climate change negotiations, he helped rebuild and served as Vice President of the nonpartisan Center for the Study of the Presidency. He and his wife, Katherine, collected and edited the recipes and stories in the Smithsonian Folklife Cookbook. They and two daughters live in Washington, DC.