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

Kent Johnson and Patrick Durgin reading: October 6, 2011

Lovebirds. On Mill Road, Milwaukee, WI. May 2011. Photo by Charles Nevsimal: http://paisleyperspective.tumblr.com/.

Thursday, October 6th at 4:30 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Patrick Durgin is the author of Pundits Scribes Pupils (Potes & Poets, 1998), And so on (Texture Press, 1999), Sorter (Duration Press, 2001), Color Music (Cuneiform Press, 2002), Imitation Poems (Atticus / Finch, 2006), and The Route (with Jen Hofer, Atelos, 2007-8). His poets theater script PQRS will be his next book, due out in 2012. He is the editor of Hannah Weiner’s Open House and The Early and Clairvoyant Journals of Hannah Weiner. Recent critical essays appear in Aerial, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Jacket2, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Postmodern Culture. He is editor and publisher of Kenning Editions, and teaches critical theory, literature, and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Patrick Durgin

Kent Johnson is a poet, translator, and editor, responsible in some way for nearly thirty poetry-related collections, including Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala, 1991) and Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1992). In 1980 and 1983, during the Sandinista revolution, he taught basic literacy and adult education in Nicaragua. From this experience he translated A Nation of Poets (West End Press, 1985), the most representative translation in English from the working-class Talleres de Poesia of Nicaragua. He has also edited Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof Books, 1998), as well as Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada’s Letters in English (Combo Books, 2005). With Forrest Gander, he has translated Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (California, 2002), which was a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation selection. Their second book of Saenz’s work, The Night, was published by Princeton in 2008, and also received a Translation Award from PEN. Among other titles, he is author of The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek (Skanky Possum, 2003; rept. CCCP, UK, 2005), Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets (BlazeVox Books, 2004), Dear Lacan (with Preface by Slavoj Zizek, CCCP, 2005), Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz (Effing Press, 2005), I Once Met (Longhouse Books, 2007), Day (The Figures/Blaze Vox, 2009), and A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara (Punch Press, 2010). Translations of his poetry have appeared in over a dozen countries, and three book collections of his work have been translated and published abroad, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, and (forthcoming) Argentina. Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, a large gathering of new and selected poems, appeared from Shearsman Books, in England, in 2008, and a bilingual anthology, Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay, is forthcoming from Shearsman, as well, in 2011. This year, 5 Works by the Rejection Group (co-authored with Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, and Kasey Silem Mohammad) appeared from Habenicht Press. In addition to awards from PEN, Johnson is recipient of a Pushcart Book of the Month Award, an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Award, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and a Lalicorne Residency in Montevideo. He has taught English and Spanish at Highland Community College for the past two decades and was named the “State Teacher of the Year” for 2004 by the Illinois Community College Trustees Association.

Kent Johnson

See the poster for this reading here.