Philip Schultz and Bill Henderson will have a little literary get-together at BookHampton downtown in East Hampton on Friday to mark the release earlier this year of a major collaboration, “The Pushcart Book of Twenty-First Century Poetry and Prose,” which they co-edited.
Get-together, that is, meaning a 6 o’clock “evening of readings, conversation, and literary discovery,” according to the bookstore. “A Q&A and book signing will follow.”
“Phil has picked his favorite poems from [Pushcart Press] selections in this century and I was honored to choose fictions, essays and memoirs from the same 25 years,” Henderson, the man behind the Pushcart enterprise and a Springs resident, writes in the foreword. “The result: 66 poems, 44 prose works selected from over 1,500 reprints in PPs 2000 to 2025.” We’re talking 634 pages’ worth.
“What I will emphasize here is that almost all of these,” he goes on, “would not have been published were it not for our small book presses and journals.”
“Be prepared, dear readers,” Schultz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and East Hamptoner, writes in his own foreword, “to find here an exhibition of paradigms of our still young century’s ever-expanding story, a panoply of diverse and distinct readings of gender, race, religion, sexuality, and of course, politics, a kind of genius of truth telling. . . .”
A ticket costs $10, which “becomes a $10 coupon toward the purchase of the featured title,” it says on the store’s website.