February 2009 @ Powells North

AWP Offsite Reading: Chicago Six Pack
Wednesday, February 11
6:30 pm, Roosevelt University's Congress Lounge
430 S Michigan Ave

Drunken Boat, A Public Space, Circumference, jubilat, Words without Borders and Action Books present POEMS of all temperatures and volumes, from the pages and off the screen. Co-sponsored by Powells North, Serendib Press and the Roosevelt University MFA Program.

Don Mee Choi and Kim Hyesoon (Action Books)

Daniel Borzutzky and Jennifer Scappettone (Circumference)

Annie Finch and Thom Ward (Drunken Boat)

Suzanne Buffam and Srikanth Reddy (jubilat)

Arda Collins and Noah Eli Gordon (A Public Space)

Ellen Dore Watson and Matthew Zapruder (Words Without Borders)

Daniel Borzutzky's two collections of poetry include The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007). He has also translated collections by Chilean poets Juan Emar and Jaime Luis Huenún, including most recently Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008). He teaches at Wright College.

Suzanne Buffam's first collection of poetry, Past Imperfect (House of Anansi, 2005), won the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada in 2005, and was named one of 2005's "Books of the Year" by The Globe and Mail. She teaches at the University of Chicago.

Don Mee Choi, translator of Kim Hyesoon's Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (Action Books, 2008), lives in Seattle. Her poems have recently appeared in Action Yes, Cipher, Fairy Tale Review, La Petite Zine, and Tinfish.

Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for her book It is Daylight. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in poetry at the University of Denver.

Annie Finch is professor of English at the University of Southern Maine and Director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003), as well as nine books about poetry, most recently The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (University of Michigan Press, 2005). Her website is at anniefinch.com.

Noah Eli Gordon's seven collections of poetry include Novel Pictoral Noise (HarperCollins, 2007), selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series competition. He currently teaches at the University of Denver.

Kim Hyesoon is the first woman to receive the Kim Su-yung Poetry Award. The author of numerous collections of poetry, including Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (Action Books, 2008), she teaches creative writing at Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Jennifer Scappettone is the author of three chapbooks and the book From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2008). The guest editor of the Aufgabe #7, she is working on the selected poems of Italian poet Amelia Rosselli. She teaches at the University of Chicago.

Srikanth Reddy's first collection of poems, Facts for Visitors, was published by the University of California Press "New California Series" in 2004. He teaches at the University of Chicago.

Thom Ward is Editor/Production Director for BOA Editions. He has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Matter of the Casket (CustomWords, 2007). He lives in Upstate New York.

Ellen Dore Watson has published three collections of poems, most recently Ladder Music (Alice James Books, 2001). She has also translated a dozen books from the Brazilian Portuguese, including Adélia Prado's The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 1990). She is the Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of two books of poems, including The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), winner of the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award, and book of translations from the Romanian, Secret Weapon: The Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House, 2007). He is the editor of Wave Books and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Houston.

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Eula Biss
Thursday, February 19
7 PM @ Powells North

Eula Biss holds a BA in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University, where she teaches nonfiction writing, and she is a founding editor of Essay Press, a new press dedicated to innovative nonfiction. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best Creative Nonfiction and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in The Believer, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, the North American Review, the Bellingham Review, the Seneca Review, and Harper’s.