"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
