"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

"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.

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

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.

"Housesitting" by Jennifer Bastian: http://jenniferbastian.com/

Thursday, March 24th at 4:30 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Poet, essayist, novelist and playwright Carla Harryman currently teaches teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. Her two most recent works are The Wide Road (Belladonna, 2011), a multi-genre collaboration with poet Lyn Hejinian, and Open Box and Other Works, a sound/music/text collaboration with Jon Raskin and the Jon Raskin Quartet (CD forthcoming Rastafan, 2011). She has published thirteen single-authored works, including Adorno’s Noise (Essay Press, 2008), Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (2005), and Gardener of Stars (2001) and has received numerous grants and awards including from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Opera America, and the Fund for Poetry. One of the original innovators of San Francisco Poets Theater, Harryman’s avant-garde theater and polyvocal performance works have been presented in San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Montreal, Auckland, the United Kingdom, Austria, and Germany, and her writing has been translated into a number of European languages. Harryman was a contributor to The Grand Piano, co-edited Lust for Life, a volume of essays on the novelist Kathy Acker, and guest edited a forthcoming special issue of The Journal of Narrative Theory entitled ”non/narrative”.

Carla Harryman

See the poster for this reading here.

Thursday, February 17 at 5:00 p.m.
Avol’s Bookstore, 315 W. Gorham St., Madison (see map)

Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her work has appeared or will appear in such journals as AGNI, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Diode, and The Rumpus. She has been a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a recipient of scholarships from The Vermont Studio Center and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.

Kara Candito

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Sightseer, winner of the 2010 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and published by the independent press Persea Books. Upon receiving her MFA from George Mason University, Cynthia taught composition and creative writing at GMU, UW-Madison, and Edgewood College. She was the 2004-2005 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and now lives in Madison with her husband and daughter. Cynthia’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Open City, Crab Orchard Review, and Best New Poets 2005, and is featured in Pleiades and Mid-American Review.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Thursday, October 28th at 4:30 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of three books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008) and The Hero Project of the Century(The Backwaters Press, 2009). A prose eulogy is forthcoming from Hooke Press in 2010. He has completed a manuscript of poetry commissioned by Atelos Books.

Tyrone Williams

Dana Ward is the editor of Cy Press and the author of several books and chapbooks including Goodnight Voice, The Drought, Roseland, & with the artist Paul Coors, I Want This Forever. He lives in Cincinnati and works as an advocate for adult literacy at the Over The Rhine Learning Center.

Dana Ward

See the poster for this event.

Thursday, September 23rd at 4:30 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Nate Pritts is the author of four full-length books of poems – most recently The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon Books, 2010) and Big Bright Sun (forthcoming, BlazeVOX). His poetry and  prose have been published widely, both online and  in print, in journals such as The Southern Review, Jacket, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Octopus, and Forklift, Ohio among many others. Nate has his MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College (’00) and  his PhD in British Romanticism from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette (’03). He lives in Syracuse, NY, where he works online with gifted students through Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. He is the founder and  principal editor of H_NGM_N.

Matt Hart is the author of the poetry collections Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and You Are Mist (Moor Books, Limited Edition, 2009). A third book, WOLF FACE, will be published this Fall by H_NGM_N Books, and a fourth, LIGHT-HEADED, will appear from BlazeVOX in Spring, 2011. His most recent chapbooks are Late Makeup Years and Decline (1979-1983) (Hell Yes! Press, 2010), which he wrote in collaboration with Dobby Gibson, and The Hours (Cinematheque Press, 2010). Additionally, his poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Harvard Review, jubilat, Lungfull! and Washington Square. A co-founder and the editor in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking and  Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Ohio and teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Thursday, April 8th at 4:30 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Myung Mi Kim is a professor of English and a core faculty member of the poetics program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Myung Mi Kim is the author of Penury (Omnidawn, 2009) Commons (University of California Press, 2002), DURA (Sun & Moon, 1999; Nightboat, 2008), The Bounty (Chax Press, 1996, 2000), and Under Flag (Kelsey Street Press, 1991). The anthologies in which her work has appeared include American Poets in the 21st century: The New American Poetics (Wesleyan, 2007), Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Talisman, 1998), Premonitions: Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (Kaya, 1995), Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women (Beacon, 1995) and other collections. Kim was awarded The Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange Award of Merit for Under Flag (Kelsey Street Press, 1991). She also received a fellowship at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, awards from the Fund for Poetry, a Daesan Foundation Translation Grant, and the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity. She lives in Buffalo, New York.

Thursday, March 11th at 4:30 p.m.
Room 126, Memorial Library, UW-Madison

Gabriel Gudding is the author of two books, A Defense of Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series, 2002) and Rhode Island Notebook (Dalkey Archive, 2007), a 436 page poem he wrote in his car. His work has been translated into several languages and appears in periodicals such as Harper’s Magazine, The Journal of the History of Ideas, New American Writing, in such anthologies as Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner), and as translator in such anthologies as The Oxford Anthology of Latin American Poetry, Poems for the Millennium and The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press). He has started creative writing programs in three prisons, holds graduate degrees from Purdue and Cornell universities, and is a professor of creative writing, literature and experimental poetics at Illinois State University.