Watershed Literary Events presents: A Reading with Marina Carreira, Ben Purkert, and Soraya Shalforoosh

EVENT DATE: Sunday, October 15, 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
EVENT PLACE: The Skate House, Meadowland Park, South Orange

Watershed Literary Events is back in the Skate House this fall, this time featuring Newark poet Marina Carreira, South Orange native Ben Purkert, and Maplewood resident Soraya Shalforoosh. The reading, which takes place on Sunday, October 15, at 3 pm, is sponsored by the Department of Recreation and Cultural Affairs and the Meadowland Park Conservancy in South Orange. All Watershed events are free and open to the public. 

Featured poets: 
Marina Carreira (she/they) is a queer, Luso-American poet artist from Newark and the author of the poetry collections Desgracada (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Tanto Tanto (Cavankerry Press, 2022), Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018), and I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry has been featured in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Paterson Literary Review, The Acentos Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Green Mountain Review, and elsewhere, and her art has been exhibited at the Newark Museum, Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, and Monmouth University Center for the Arts. 

Ben Purkert is the author most recently of the novel The Men Can't Be Saved (Abrams, 2023) and the poetry collection For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books, 2018). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, and The Wall Street Journal, and he has been featured on NPR and in The Boston Globe and Esquire. Purkert has taught writing at Rutgers University and at NYU and is now a member of the faculty at Sarah Lawrence’s MFA program. Born and raised in South Orange, he has fond memories of sledding down Flood's Hill. 

Soraya Shalforoosh’s first collection of poetry is This Version of Earth (Barrow Street, 2014). She has been a featured poet in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets Emerging Poet Series and has had poems and reviews published in Black Earth Institute, Apogee Journal, Taos Journal, Barrow Street, New York Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, and Marlboro Review, among other venues. A graduate of the Creative Writing MFA program at The New School, Shalforoosh has been a featured guest poet at William Paterson University, Berkeley College, and San Jose State University, as well as a guest speaker at the American Embassy in Algeria. She grew up in New Jersey and currently lives in Maplewood. 

Watershed was founded in 2019 and hosts four readings a year. For more information, please contact Blake Smith at bsmith@southorange.org