Author and translator Bill Porter presents work from his newest book, Guide To Capturing a Plum Blossom, due to be published shortly by Copper Canyon.  He'll be joined for this evening by Eric Paul Shaffer, a resident of Hawaii, who will read from Lahaina Noon and other books of poetry.

In 1972, Bill Porter left America and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After more than three years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and supported himself by teaching English and later by working as a journalist at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. During this time, he married a Chinese woman, with whom he has two children, and he began working on translations of Chinese poetry and Buddhist texts. In 1993, he returned to America so that his children could learn English, and he has lived ever since in Port Townsend, Washington. Produced under the pseudonym 'Red Pine,' his translations have been honored with a number of awards, including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, and more recently a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he received to fund a project entitled Mountains and Rivers of Chinese Poetry, which he calls the poetry version of his book Zen Baggage, which recounts a pilgrimage to sites in China associated with the beginning of Zen Buddhism.

Eric Paul Shaffer is author of five books of poetry, including Lāhaina Noon; Living at the Monastery, working in the Kitchen; and Portable Planet. His poetry appears in North American Review, Slate, Ploughshares, and The Sun Magazine, Australia’s Island and Quadrant, Canada’s CV2, Dalhousie Review, Event, and Fiddlehead, Éire’s Poetry Ireland Review and Southword Journal, England’s Stand and Magma, and New Zealand’s Poetry NZ and Takahe. Shaffer received the 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature, a 2006 Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Award for Lāhaina Noon, and the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry. He lives on O‘ahu and teaches at Honolulu Community College.