Rebecca Wolff and Laura Sims reading: April 10, 2012

"Swahililand," photograph by 13thWitness: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13thwitness/

Tuesday, April 10th, 7:00 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Rebecca Wolff received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1993 and helped to found the journal Fence in 1998. The next nine years of Wolff’s life were devoted to publishing the journal, and also to Fence Books, launched in 2001. During these years Wolff found paying gigs at the Poetry Society of America, BOMB magazine, and as a freelance editor for publications such as BookForum and PenguinPutnam. In 2001 her first book of poems, Manderley, was published by the University of Illinois Press, after having been selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky. In September of 2004, Wolff’s second book of poems, Figment, was published by W. W. Norton as a winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize. In 2007, Fence and Fence Books found sponsorship at the University at Albany, in partnership with the New York State Writers Institute, of which Wolff is now a Program Fellow. Her third book of poetry, The King, was published in 2009, and The Beginners, her first novel, was published in 2011.

Rebecca Wolff

Laura Sims is the author of two books of poetry: Stranger (Fence Books, 2009); and Practice, Restraint (Fence Books, Alberta Prize, 2005); and of four chapbooks, including Corrections (Bronze Skull Press, 2006) and Bank Book (Answer Tag Press, 2004). Her work was included in the anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), and individual poems have appeared in the journals: Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Aufgabe, Crayon, CAB/NET, Octopus, First Intensity, 26, How2, Parcel, 6X6, La Petite Zine, Columbia Poetry Review, jubilat, LIT, and Fence, among others. She has published book reviews in Boston Review, Jacket, and Rain Taxi; an overview essay on the work of Diane Williams in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (2003); and the article, “David Markson and the Problem of the Novel,” in New England Review (2008). She is currently writing a series of post-apocalyptic poems, and editing her third poetry manuscript, My god is this a man, due out from Fence Books in 2013.

Laura Sims

G.C. Waldrep reading: February 14, 2012

"On the Balcony," photograph by Miroslav Hak: http://rogallery.com/Hak/Hak-hm.html

Tuesday, February 14th, 7:00 p.m. (Happy Valentine’s Day!)
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

G. C. Waldrep (Ph.D., Duke University; MFA, University of Iowa) is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Bucknell University. He is the author of four full-length collections of poems: Goldbeater’s Skin (2003); Disclamor (2007); Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize; and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, with John Gallaher (2011). His work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Harper’s, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, and Tin House, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. His work has earned prizes and residencies from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Campbell Corner Foundation. He was a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature. Waldrep is also the author of Southern Workers and the Search for Community, a historical monograph on the lives of Southern textile workers during the early twentieth century. At Bucknell he teaches creative writing, directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, serves as Editor-at-Large for the Kenyon Review and is the Editor of West Branch. He is the first recipient of the Margaret Hollinshead Ley Professorship in Poetry and Creative Writing.

G.C.'s hat, amidst flowers.

Susan Schultz and Connie Deanovich reading: November 2, 2011

Badger Munitions Dump, May 2011. Photo by Steel Wagstaff

Wednesday, November 2nd, 5:30 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Susan Schultz is a Professor in the English department at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, where she teaches modern and contemporary poetry, American literature, and creative writing. Her critical work includes A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (University of Alabama Poetry and Poetics Series, 2005) as well as essays on Denise Riley and adoption, Linh Dinh and disgust, Donald Rumsfeld and political poetry, and the poetries of Hawai‘i. Schultz was the editor (or co-editor) of the collections The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 1995) and Multiformalisms (WordTech, 2008).

Her books of poetry include Aleatory Allegories (Salt Press, 2000), Memory Cards & Adoption Papers (Potes & Poets, 2001), And Then Something Happened (Salt Press, 2004), and Dementia Blog (Singing Horse Press, 2008). Schultz is the editor and publisher of Tinfish Press, an independent press based in Hawai’i which publishes an annual journal of experimental poetry from the Pacific, as well as a series of chapbooks and full-length poetry volumes. She also runs a blog.

Susan Schultz

Connie Deanovich is the Whiting Writers Award-winning author of Zombie Jet and Watusi Titanic. Her poetry and essays have been published in numerous anthologies, magazines, and journals, including Real Things: An Anthology of Popular Culture in American Poetry, Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975, American Poetry: the Next Generation, New American Writing, Bomb Magazine, World Poets: Scribner Writers Series (Ron Padgett, editor in chief), and Richter 858, published by The Shifting Foundation and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Originally from Chicago where she edited the little magazine B City, Connie now lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Connie Deanovich