Catch up with Wesleyan authors at AWP

Wesleyan Sponsored Events!

Saturday 12–1:15
Portland Ballroom 252, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
S208. Writing In and Out of Worlds. (Rae Armantrout,  Abigail Chabitnoy,  Joy Harjo, Priscilla Page, sam sax) A reading by Wesleyan authors, illustrating differing experiences and methods of expression in 21st-century language arts. Whether reconfiguring the language of colonizing documents, staging stories to music, paring language into explosive soundbites, or questioning our perceptions by splicing language in unexpected ways, these poets illustrate how ethnicity, culture, sexuality, gender, and politics shape one’s work, and how poetry can be used to bear witness and to articulate the world we want.

Saturday, 1;30–2:30
AWP Booth 5001 PARTY
Signings, conversation, coffee & cookies with Rae Armantrout, Abigail Chabitnoy, Joy Harjo, Priscilla Page, and sam sax.

Booth 5001! Check out our new books and ask about what is forthcoming!

Wesleyan Featured Events!
Friday 3­–4:15
Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
F279. Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play and A Circle of Response.(Priscilla Page,  Mary Kathryn Nagle ,  Joy Harjo ) Joy Harjo, Mary Kathryn Nagle, and Priscilla Page read from their forthcoming book Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play and A Circle of Responses. Harjo’s play is the center piece of this book that contains essays by Nagle and
Page as well as three interviews with Native theater practitioners Rolland Meinholtz, Randy Reinholz, and Harjo. This circle of responses provides context for the play and offers insights on the trajectory of Native American theater in the US.

Friday, 4–5:30
Counter-Desecration: Collective Remedying
1223 NE M L King Blvd
Contributors to Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene will read entries & other poetic works. Please join us for an afternoon of collective remedying with: Dan Beachy-Quick; Anna Lena Phillips Bell; Susan Briante; Allison Cobb; Allison Hedge Coke; Matthew Cooperman; Alison Hawthorne Deming; Adam Dickinson; Lori Anderson Moseman; Linda Russo (co-editor); John Pluecker; Tyrone Williams; and a reading in memoriam to co-editor Marthe Reed.

Saturday 12–1:15
Portland Ballroom 252, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
S208. Writing In and Out of Worlds. (Rae Armantrout,  Abigail Chabitnoy,  Joy Harjo, Priscilla Page, Sam Sax) A reading by Wesleyan authors, illustrating differing experiences and methods of expression in 21st-century language arts. Whether reconfiguring the language of colonizing documents, staging stories to music, paring language into explosive soundbites, or questioning our perceptions by splicing language in unexpected ways, these poets illustrate how ethnicity, culture, sexuality, gender, and politics shape one’s work, and how poetry can be used to bear witness and to articulate the world we want.

Saturday, 1;30–2:30
AWP Booth 5001 PARTY
Signings, conversation, coffee & cookies with Rae Armantrout, Abigail Chabitnoy, Joy Harjo, Priscilla Page, and sam sax.

You can find our authors at these events across Portland!

Rae Armantrout
Thursday 6–9
Pacific Northwest College of Art, 511 NW Broadway, Portland, OR 97209
Burning Deck Exhibit and Tribute to Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop
Cost: Free
A display of Burning Deck publications from the past sixty years, including rare letterpress editions and magazines, along with a casual reading celebration, with many collaborators, friends, and former students of the Waldrops reading from favorite Burning Deck or Waldrop books. Featuring Alejandro de Acosta, Rae Armantrout, Kristin P. Bradshaw, Lee Ann Brown, Matthew Cooperman, Danielle Dutton, E. Tracy Grinnell, Aaron Kunin, Jena Osman, Lisa Pearson, Sarah Riggs, Martin Riker, Lynn Xu, Magdalena Zurawski, and others. Exhibit open from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m, readings begin at 6:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.

Thursday 8–10
Imperial in Hotel Lucia, back of lobby, 400 SW Broadway, Portland OR, 97205
Lana Turner Poetry Reading
Cost: Free
Come for finger food and great readers (Sara Deniz Akant, Rae Armantrout, Shane Book, Forrest Gander, Andrew Joron, Douglas Kearney, Rodney Koeneke, Joyelle McSweeney, Rusty Morrison, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Felicia Zamora, and Andrew Zawacki). Comfortable chairs. One mile from the Oregon Convention Center, downtown West Side, in the Hotel Lucia/Imperial (these names seem to overlap).

Friday 7–9
Strum Guitar Bar, 1415 SE Stark St #C, Portland, OR 97214
Switchback Books and Counterpath Book Launch Party
Cost: Free
Url: https://www.facebook.com/events/1890165784412471/
Switchback Books and Counterpath invite you to celebrate the launch of three new books: The Body In Language: An Anthology, edited by Edwin Torres, from Counterpath; Kristen Case’s Principles of Economics from Switchback; and Irène Mathieu’s Grand Marronage from Switchback. Join us at Strum Guitar Bar for drinks and readings by Rae Armantrout, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Kristen Case, Brandon Downing, Stefania Heim, Jen Hofer, Irène Mathieu, Tracie Morris, Urayoán Noel, Jenn Marie Nunes, and Edwin Torres.

Friday 8–9:30
Passages Bookshop, 1223 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Portland, OR 97232
Kiosk
Cost: Free
Readings by Cole Swensen, Tyrone Williams, Rae Armantrout, Tim Shaner, and Sarah Campbell to celebrate Kiosk: a Journal of Poetry, Poetics, and Prose, edited from 2001–2005 by Gordon Hadfield, Sasha Steensen, and Kyle Schlesinger. Free and open to the public.

Abigail Chabitnoy
Friday 5–7
Cardinal Club, 18 NE 28th Ave, Portland, OR 97232
Triple Book Release Party
Cost: Free
Come celebrate the release of three new poetry collections: Abigail Chabitnoy’s How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan UP), Kristin George Bagdanov’s Fossils in the Making (Black Ocean) and John Sibley Williams’s As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Books). With additional readings by Melissa Resser Poulin, C.L. Young, and Philip Schaefer.

Thursday 3:30­–5
Crush Bar, 1400 SE Morrison St, Portland, OR 97214
Happy Hour with Poetry International, Calypso Editions & Locked Horn Press
Cost: Free
Url: https://www.facebook.com/events/401183363789294/
Poetry International, Calypso Editions, and Locked Horn Press celebrate their ongoing commitment to publishing exciting voices from the U.S. and around the world. Join us for a fun happy hour reading featuring poets from these three literary communities. Special guests include Kaveh Akbar, Jericho Brown, Ilya Kaminsky, Abby Chabitnoy, Katie Farris, Breeann Kyte Kirby, Jeff Leong, Paige Lewis, Jenny Minniti–Shippey, and Hope Wakube.

Joy Harjo
Thursday 2–4:15
Zachary A. Doss Memorial Stage, Sponsored by USC, Exhibit Hall, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
R285B. Truth to Power: Writers Respond to the Rhetoric of Hate and Fear. (Joy Harjo,  Pamela Uschuk,  Patricia Wesley) An anthology of 119 American writers, Truth To Powerwas published by Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts which has a booth at the Bookfair. Proceeds from sales of Truth To Power go to the ACLU, Standing Rock Sioux Water Protectors, Southern Poverty Law Center, International Immigration Law Center and Friends of the Earth. This is the first reading from it in the Pacific Northwest. Readers include Joy Harjo, LeAnn Howe, Richard Jackson, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley and Garrett Hongo.

F279. Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play and A Circle of Response.(Priscilla Page,  Mary Kathryn Nagle ,  Joy Harjo ) Joy Harjo, Mary Kathryn Nagle, and Priscilla Page read from their forthcoming book Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play and A Circle of Responses. Harjo’s play is the center piece of this book that contains essays by Nagle and
Page as well as three interviews with Native theater practitioners Rolland Meinholtz, Randy Reinholz, and Harjo. This circle of responses provides context for the play and offers insights on the trajectory of Native American theater in the US.

Kazim Ali
Wednesday, 6–8
Passages Bookshop, 1223 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Portland, OR 97232
A Resplendence of Poets: Chinook Territories, Portland, OR
Cost: Free
Url: http://www.passagesbookshop.com/
A Resplendence of Poets: Chinook Territories, Portland, OR. Kazim Ali, Kayla Czaga, Laura Da’, Raoul Fernandes, Ian Williams, Ali Blythe, Emily Kendal Frey, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Demian DinéYazhi’, and Miguel Murphy. Organized by Jen Currin and Sheryda Warrener.

Thursday 6–9
Portland Art Museum, Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 97205
Fierce Love: The Field Office Collective Reading
Cost: Free
Url: http://fieldoffice.agency/love
We’re doing it again! The Field Office is coming together for a collective reading this Spring, featuring: Kazim Ali, Curtis Bauer, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Ansel Elkins, Nikky Finney, Vievee Francis, Ross Gay, Tyehimba Jess, Dorianne Laux, Ada Limón, Adrian Matejka, Gregory Pardlo, Steve Scafidi, and Marcus Wicker. More information: http://fieldofficeagency.com/love

Friday 10:30–11:45
Portland Ballroom 256, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
F177A. Reinventing the Wheel: The Tradition of Innovation in Poetry. (Kazim Ali,  Jenny Johnson,  Traci Brimhall,  Vandana Khanna,  Blas Flaconer) Sidney famously writes, “And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way” (“Astrophel and Stella”). However, one would only need to read Homer, Virgil, and Dante, the letters between Wordsworth and Coleridge or Moore and Bishop, to recognize the long tradition of poets mentoring and inspiring other poets. The poets will challenge the notion that tradition and innovation are at odds by revealing how specific poems influenced them and led them to better understand different poetic elements.

Saturady, 1:30–2:45
B115, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
S217. Fifty Years of FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. (David Walker,  David Young,  Stuart Friebert,  Martha Collins,  Kazim Ali) Since 1969, FIELD Magazine has been known as one of the country’s leading journals of contemporary poetry and poetics. In 2019, FIELD will publish its 100th and final issue. This panel, featuring two founding editors and three later additions, will discuss the magazine’s history and values, including its annual symposium of essays on the work of a major poet, its commitment to translation, and its openness to a wide variety of voices, both established and emerging.

Camille Dungy
Thursday 4:30–5:45
Oregon Ballroom 201–202, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
R315. Consequences of Silence, Sponsored by Blue Flower Arts. (Simon Armitage,  Marcelo Hernandez Castillo,  Camille Dungy,  Samiya Bashir,  Alison Granucci) As poets, we love language—and fight with it. Language (in the mouth, on the page) is one way humans can experience and express the world: not only words on a page, but a bodily feeling as one speaks and hears poetry. These are ways language creates meaning, and helps us define ourselves and belong. The illusion of belonging is when language fails us: draws us in, but holds us at a distance. True belonging is when language connects us across time, languages, cultures, and emotional divides.

Saturday, 10;30–11:45, D139–140, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
S161. Taking It All Off. (Camille Dungy,  Kathryn Miles ,  Suzanne Roberts,  Tracy Ross,  Erika Meitner) Telling the truth is perilous for women writers in a pussy-grabbing, #metoo movement era. Whether you’re reporting in the Middle East, retelling personal trauma, or sexing up a hot bedroom scene, it’s easy to feel exposed. We’ve got you covered with this multi-genre roundtable. With topics ranging from global travel and dicey field research to balancing risqué self-revelation and academic appointments, we’ll talk about what’s at stake for women writers who embrace risk in the name of narrative.

Honorée Jeffers
Thursday, 1;30–2;45
C124, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
R226. From Slavery to Immigration: Poets on the American Family, a Site of Struggle.(Artress White,  Honoree Jeffers,  Ananda Lima,  Esther Lin) The American family as an array of diverse, nationalized bodies has been a work in progress since its inception, with many people of color unable to buy into its elusive promise of social stability. Amid an historical and present-day backdrop of vacillating protections governing civil rights and immigration status, four poets examine the American family as a dream deferred.

Shane McCrae
Friday 4:30–5:45
D137-138, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
F306. A Celebration of the Life and Work of Lucie Brock-Broido. (Elise Paschen,  Tree Swenson,  Frank Bidart,  Shane McCrae,  Dorothea Lasky) One of the most influential poets of her generation, Lucie Brock-Broido published four books: A Hunger, The Master Letters, Trouble in Mind, and Stay, Illusion. A beloved teacher as a Briggs-Copeland lecturer at Harvard and Director of Poetry at Columbia University, Lucie wrote, “My theory is that a poem is troubled into its making. It’s not like a thing that blooms; it’s a thing that wounds.” Friends and colleagues will gather to read her dazzling poems and discuss her life’s work. Join us!

sam sax
Thursday, 7–10
Revolution Hall, The Sunset Room, 1300 SE Stark St, Portland, OR 97214
Black Lawrence Press Reading & Party
Cost: Free
Url: https://www.facebook.com/events/425578404885607/
Come join as we celebrate a selection of our recently-published titles. Ryan Patrick Smith, Claudia Cortese, Denise Bergman, Rob Carney, Sarah McKinstry-Brown, Jeanann Verlee, sam sax, and Marc McKee will read from their work. Beverages and hors d’oeuvres to be served

Friday 630–9:30Union/Pine, 525 Pine St, Portland, OR 97214
Diode Editions Author Readings & Reception
Cost: Free
Url: https://www.diodeeditions.com/calendar
Join us on Friday, March 29, 2019 at Union/Pine to celebrate the brilliance of our authors and forthcoming catalog with an evening of readings from Dorothy Chan, Jehanne Dubrow, Paul Guest, Jared Harél, Randall Mann, Philip Metres, Simone Person, Emilia Phillips, Ricky Ray, sam sax, and KC Trommer. Free food and cash bar.

Evie Shockley
Thursday, 1:30–2:45
Portland Ballroom 253-254, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
R246. A Reading & Conversation with Dawn Lundy Martin, Morgan Parker, and Evie Shockley, Sponsored by Cave Canem. (Evie Shockley,  Morgan Parker,  Dawn Lundy Martin,  Fatimah Asghar ) Three award-winning poets give brief readings, followed by a moderated conversation about poetry as a space for complex negotiations and radical reimaginings. While the meaning of diversity is being debated, these poets’ unique voices and varied strategies expand the discourse beyond considerations of race and ethnicity. Their views of the poet as artist and social being disrupt familiar tropes assigned to “the writer of color.”

Rachel Zucker
Friday, 3–4:15
B110-112, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
F258. Commonplace Live: A Reading Featuring Guests of Rachel Zucker’s Podcast.(Rachel Zucker,  Ross Gay,  Adam Falkner,  Sabrina Mark,  Gabrielle Calvocoressi) This reading features Ross Gay, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Adam Faulkner, former guests of Commonplace, a podcast Rachel Zucker started in 2016. A series of intimate and captivating interviews by Rachel Zucker with poets and artists about quotidian objects, experiences or obsessions, Commonplace conversations explore the politics, phobias, spiritual practices, and other extraliterary forms of knowledge that are vital to an artist’s life and work.

Evie Shockley’s award-winning book semiautomatic is now available in paperback!
Poetry that acts as a fierce and loving resistance to violence.

“Evie Shockley’s semiautomatic goes beyond mere weaponry. This book is revelatory. A tool in the chest of cultural workers, a vocabulary that resists decoration; this is self-portraiture and truth-telling at its best. From her epic ‘the topsy suite’ to her one-acts (a new form), through her fearless lens and appropriation of authorities, there’s no level of denial or proof-vest that will protect you from Shockley’s poetry. You can run, Reader, but you will not be able to look the other way.”  –Willie Perdomo

“Evie Shockley suggests that poetry is necessary to seeing, surviving with equilibrium and wholeness in this period’s vital and precarious junctures. The poems in semiautomatic are on fire. This will make an excellent source book of poetic form and historically grounded black aesthetics for the classroom.” –Erica Hunt

“There is no keener mind in American poetry than Shockley’s, with her quick turns and inflections, slipping between subjectivity and documentary, between verse and refrain. Her poems engage—politically, formally, historically, profoundly—with the redistribution of power through language. Read this book and get shook.” –D.A. Powell

Evie Shockley’s semiautomatic insists that art can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. Responding to the inescapable evidence of the discriminatory terms placed on black life, her poems connect the violence facing people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that both encompass and divide. The poems of semiautomatic vary from fragment to narrative and from sequence to song. Shockley observe past and present; meditating on what wisdom we might glean from memory to guide us to a better future.

Shockley’s previous works include the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), winner of the Black Caucus of ALA’s Literary Award for Poetry, and a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), in addition to two chapbooks. She also has a book of criticism, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa, 2011). Her prose writing has appeared in Callaloo, African American Review, and Indiana Review. Her poetry has appeared in MELUS, Harvard Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and in the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, among other publications. Shockley received her BA in English from Northwestern University, followed by a J.D. from University of Michigan Law School, before earning her MA and PhD from Duke University. She is assistant professor in the English department at Rutgers University.

Watch Evie Shockley read from new work, including work from semiautomatic

poem from the book:
weather or not

time was on its side, its upside down. it was a new error. generation why-not had voted its con-science and a climate of indifference was generating maelstromy weather. we acted as if the planet was a stone-cold player, but turns out the earth had a heart and it was melting, pacific islanders first into the hotter water. just a coincidence—the polar bears are white and their real estate was being liquidated too. meanwhile, in the temper-temper zone, the birds were back and i hadn’t slept—had it been a night or a season? the birdsong sounded cheap, my thoughts cheaper, penny, inky, dark. language struck me as wooden, battered. the words became weeds, meaning i couldn’t see any use for them. i had signed my name repeatedly without any sign of change. i was still bleeding from yesterday’s sound bites, and the coming elections were breeding candid hates by the hand-over-fistful. there’d been an arab spring, but it was winter all summer in america.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Inquisition, is a finalist for a Lambda Award.
Read the finalist list here.

from Inquisition

John

Who was I when I was writing this name
Copper oxidizes to green
Air packs itself tight in the seed
Seed unspools in the ground writing the biography of dirt
A little down the road another tower is going up
A man holds his briefcase over his head like an umbrella
In the rain bodies are soft and disappear into sound
On John Street almost choking on loneliness
And the waters of the river nothing so much as the air around us and ash
What would outlive us drifts sparkling into the October air
When you ask who am I past this storm-tossed vessel
The one you’re always bailing out
It is just another way to ignore this constant unraveling
This always reaching for an end when clearly there’s no end in sight

 

“Ali’s use of the inherent musicality of language gives the poems an incantatory beauty…The poems feel vibrant and effortless, with one sound, one word, blending into the next. The resulting music, that lives in the mind, in the mouth, and the air, offers its own meaning, a sense of understanding on an elemental level that is satisfying and complex.”
—Vandana Khanna, author of The Goddess Monologues

“What a gift Kazim Ali’s Inquisition is, what a generosity, in its sustained and sustaining inhabitation of the mystery. That, without ignoring heartbreak or rage, it understands that we are always “at the end of knowing,” and shows us how we might reside there. And from which residence, Inquisition reminds me: love.”
—Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

About Kazim Ali
Poet, editor, and prose writer Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian descent. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany–SUNY, and an MFA from New York University. Ali’s poetry collections include The Far Mosque, which won Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day, and Sky Ward. Ali’s poems, both lyric and musical, explore the intersection of faith and daily life. His prose includes The Disappearance of Seth and Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities.

Other Kazim Ali titles available from Wesleyan