Juliana Spahr reading: October 19, 2012

Photo credit: http://hawaiiw.net/

Friday, October 19, 7:00 p.m.
Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, 426 W. Gilman Street, Madison, WI

Juliana Spahr is a poet, scholar, and editor. She is the author of Well Then There Now (Black Sparrow, 2011); The Transformation (Atelos, 2007); This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005); Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); and Response (Sun & Moon Press, 1996), winner of the National Poetry Series Award. She is Professor of English at Mills College.

Spahr also edits with Jena Osman the book series Chain Links and with nineteen other poets she edits of the collectively funded Subpress. With David Buuck she wrote Army of Lovers, a book about two friends who are writers in a time of war and ecological collapse (forthcoming from City Lights). She has edited with Stephanie Young The Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays in Which We Ponder the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism, In Which We Say We Have Some Ears and Are Willing to Listen, and to Which Some Writers Respond (essay collection) (Chain Links, 2011), with Joan Retallack Poetry & Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave, 2006), and with Claudia Rankine American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan UP, 2002). And several times she has organized free schools with Joshua Clover: the 95 cent Skool (summer of 2010) and the Durruti Free Skool (summer of 2011).

This event is made possible with support from the UW-Madison Department of English, the Anonymous Fund, and the Center for the Humanities Sawyer Seminar on Biopolitics.

 

Cathy Park Hong reading: October 4, 2012

Trent Miller, Dredgers and Drifters, http://trentmillerart.com/

Thursday, October 4, 7:00 p.m.
Room 7191, Helen C. White Hall, UW-Madison

Cathy Park Hong‘s first book, Translating Mo’um was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by WW Norton. Her third book of poems, Engine Empire, will be published in May 2012 by WW Norton. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Poetry, Paris Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, Harvard Review, Boston Review, The Nation, and other journals.  She is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

This event is made possible with support from the Department of English, the Asian American Studies Program, and the Anonymous Fund at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

READING UPDATE

Unfortunately, Laura Sims, one of our scheduled readers for the Tuesday, April 10th reading, has had to cancel. Fortunately, Rebecca Wolff, our other scheduled reader, has agreed to read for the full hour, and will share selections from both her recent poetry and fiction. See you at Rebecca Wolff’s reading soon!

Rebecca Wolff 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

***UPDATE: Laura Sims will no longer be able to read at this time. We do hope to feature her at some time.***

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.