Lighthouse Reading Series, Galleries at CSU (1307 Euclid Ave)

Henk Rossouw’s book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. The African Poetry Book Fund included his chapbook The Water Archives in their boxset New-Generation African Poets: Tano. Poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. An assistant professor, Henk teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is from South Africa. 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of The Fluency of Light (2013) and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (2017). Her most recent book of essays was nominated for the University of Iowa’s Essay Prize and won the CLMP Firecracker Award for nonfiction. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan.

Lighthouse Reading Series, Galleries at CSU (1307 Euclid Ave)

Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and serves on the editorial team at Fence. His work has been recognized most recently with a New Works Grant from the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Holloway Visiting Professorship in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. Matuk is currently working on a collaboration with visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez that is forthcoming from Singing Saw Press. 

Anne Lesley Selcer is the author of Sun Cycle, selected by CA Conrad as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 First Book Poetry Competition, as well as the essay collection Blank Sign Book and from A Book of Poems on Beauty, winner of the Gazing Grain Press Award. Her writing on art includes Banlieusard, a book-length text for Artspeak, as well as essays for museum and gallery catalogs and art magazines. Writing occasionally manifests as moving image or sound. 

Lighthouse Reading Series, Galleries at CSU (1307 Euclid Ave)

Paola Capó-García is the author of Clap for Me That's Not Me, selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of Rescue Press’s 2017 Black Box Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Volta, Latino Book Review, jubilat, Poetry Society of America, Academy of American Poets, and others. She is the co-founder/editor of the literary/arts journal littletell, alongside Maria Flaccavento. Originally from San Juan, PR, she now lives in San Diego, CA, where she teaches twelfth-grade English.  

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Advantages of Being Evergreen, winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 Open Book Poetry Competition, and of The Spectral Wilderness, selected by Mark Doty for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbook The Gospel According to X. He is an assistant professor of poetry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

Lighthouse Reading Series, Galleries at CSU (1307 Euclid Ave)

Amy Long is the author of Codependence, selected by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 Essay Collection Competition. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech and a master’s degree in women’s studies from the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Hayden's Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She serves as a contributing editor at the drug history blog Points.

Conor Bracken is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in the Adroit Journal, At Length, Colorado Review, Diode, Indiana Review, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. His chapbook Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), was selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Recent translations include Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Findlay. 

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) was an Amazigh Moroccan poet and writer. In the 1960s, he established the Poésie Toute movement and co-founded the avant-garde journal Souffles. He authored many novels and collections of poetry, among them Agadir, Soleil Arachnide, Ce Maroc!, and Legende et vie d’Agoun’chich. Scorpionic Sun is the first book-length translation of his work into English. 

Caren Beilin is the author of a collection of short fiction, Americans, Guests, or Us (New Michigan Press, 2012) and a novel, The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014). A memoir, Spain, was published in Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series in 2018. Her shorter prose appears in venues such as Fence, McSweeney's, The Offing, and LA Review of Books, and she serves as an editor for Full Stopmagazine, a literary site devoted to supporting, critiquing, and acknowledging the work of small presses. She teaches creative writing at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. 

Anna Maria Hong’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2017 First Book Poetry Competition and was published in April 2018. Her novella, H & G, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s inaugural Clarissa Dalloway Prize and was published by Sidebrow Books in May 2018. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in early 2020. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry, fiction, and essays in numerous journals and anthologies including The Nation, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Ecotone, POOL, Fence, Harvard Review, 250 Poems, Verse Daily, Best New Poets, and The Best American Poetry. She joined the Literature faculty at Bennington College in July 2018.

Named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine, Jason Koo is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: More Than Mere Light, America's Favorite Poem, and Man on Extremely Small Island, winner of the De Novo Poetry Prize and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award for the best Asian American book of 2009. He has published his poetry and prose in the American Scholar, Missouri Review, Village Voice, and Yale Review, among other places. He earned his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri–Columbia. An associate teaching professor of English at Quinnipiac University, Koo is the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets and creator of the Bridge (poetsbridge.org).

Shaelyn Smith grew up in northern Michigan, and received an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Alabama. Her first book, The Leftovers, was selected by Renee Gladman as the winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2017 Essay Collection Competition, and was featured as a part of “The Genre of Resistance: Debut Literary Nonfiction of 2018” in the September/October 2018 issue of Poets & Writers magazine. Other work can be found in Essay Daily, storySouth, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Forklift, Ohio. She lives in Auburn, Alabama.

Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018). Her translations from the French include adagio ma non troppo, by Ryoko Sekiguchi (Les Figues Press, 2018) and The Next Loves, by Stéphane Bouquet (forthcoming, Nightboat Books), as well as a book of philosophy by Frederic Neyrat, Atopias (co-translated with Walt Hunter, Fordham University Press, 2017). Originally from northeast Tennessee, she holds an AB from Harvard College, a Masters in cinema from the Université Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, an MFA in poetry from New York University, and a PhD in English from the University of Virginia, where her dissertation work explored the relationship between contemporary US poetry and global labor transformation. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Furman University.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, New-Generation African Poets Series) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, prizes from the Ploughshares’Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, and the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, the Key West Literary Seminar, Dickinson House, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, where she was the 2017–2018 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently the Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing at the CSU Poetry Center.

Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Wisconsin. The author of North of Order (YesYes Books), Book of Lake (Cutback), and Orient (CSU Poetry Center Press), he currently lives in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Brian Blanchfield is the author of three books of poetry and prose, most recently Proxies: Essays Near Knowing and A Several World. Among his honors are a 2016 Whiting Award for Nonfiction, the 2014 James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and a 2015 Howard Foundation Fellowship in Poetry. His work has appeared in Harper's, BOMB, The Oxford American, Chicago Review, The Nation, and other magazines and anthologies. He teaches at the University of Idaho and in the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and lives in Moscow, Idaho.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of eleven published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, and, most recently, Calamities, a collection of linked essay-fictions on the intersections of writing, drawing, and community. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s, Stonecutter, and Poetry Magazine; her first monograph of drawings, Prose Architectures, was published in summer 2017 by Wave Books. A 2014­–15 fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant and a 2017 Lannan Foundation Writing Residency in Marfa, TX, she makes work in New England.

Dave Lucas is the author of Weather (University of Georgia Press, 2011), which received the 2012 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Named by Rita Dove as one of thirteen “young poets to watch,” he has also received a Discovery/The Nation Prize and a Cleveland Arts Prize. He teaches at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland, where he was born and raised.

James Allen Hall’s collection of personal lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Essay Collection Award, judged by Chris Kraus. His essays have appeared in Story Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly, and Bennington Review, among others. He is the author of the poetry collection Now You’re the Enemy, which won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Recent poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, New England Review, American Poetry Review, and A Public Space. James teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College.

Yona Harvey is the author of Hemming the Water (Four Way Books, 2013), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in poetry. Her poems and essays can be found in The Force of What’s Possible: Accessibility and the Avant-Garde and Writing Away the Stigma: Ten Courageous Writers Tell True Stories About Depression, Bipolar Disorder, ADHD, OCD, PTSD & more. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda, a companion series to the bestselling comic Black Panther; and co-wrote Marvel’s Black Panther and The Crew. She teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Sheila McMullin is a poet, intersectional feminist, youth ally, and organizer. She is the author of daughterrarium, chosen by Daniel Borzutzky as the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2016 First Book Poetry Competition. McMullin co-edited the collections Humans of Ballou and The Day Tajon Got Shot from Shout Mouse Press. She volunteers at her local animal rescue and holds an MFA from George Mason University. Find more about her writing, editing, and activism online at www.moonspitpoetry.com.

Eric Fair, an Army veteran, worked in Iraq as a contract interrogator in 2004. He is the author of the memoir Consequence, published by Macmillan in 2016. He won a Pushcart prize for his 2012 essay “Consequence,” which was published first in Ploughshares and then in Harper’s magazine. His op-eds on interrogation have also been published in the Washington Post and the New York Times. He lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Hayan Charara is a poet, children’s book author, essayist, and editor. His third collection of poetry, Something Sinister (2016), was awarded the 2017 Arab American Book Award; he is also the author of The Sadness of Others (2006) and The Alchemist’s Diary (2001). His children’s book, The Three Lucys (2016), received the New Voices Award Honor, and he edited Inclined to Speak (2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. With Fady Joudah, he is a series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He currently teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston.

Abraham Smith is the author of four poetry collections: Ashagalomancy (Action Books, 2015); Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer (Action Books, 2014); Hank (Action Books, 2010); and Whim Man Mammon (Action Books, 2007). In 2015, he released Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press), a co-edited anthology of contemporary rural American poetry and related essays. His creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Destruction of Man, his book-length poem about farming, is forthcoming in 2018 from Third Man Books. Presently, he is at work upon a poetry manuscript about cranes—birds whose song and stature electrify him. This fall, Smith joins the Weber State University community as an assistant professor of English.

Kazim Ali’s books include several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetr; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books' New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One's Blue; nd the cross-genre text Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities. He has also published a translation of Abahn Sabana David by Marguerite Dura, Water's Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri, Oasis of Now: Selected Poems by Sohrab Sepehri, nd (with Libby Murphy) L'amour by Marguerite Duras. s books of essays include Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence and Fasting for Ramadan. Ali s an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College.

Lily Hoang is the author of five books, including A Bestiary (winner of the inaugural Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Essay Collection Competition, selected by Wayne Koestenbaum) and Changing (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award). With Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she edited the anthology The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She is Director of the MFA program at New Mexico State University. She serves as Editor at Puerto del Sol and for Jaded Ibis Press.

Jane Lewty is the author of two poetry collections: Bravura Cool (1913 Press: 2013), winner of the 1913 First Book Prize in 2011, and In One Form To Find Another, which won the CSU Poetry Center Open Book Prize in 2016. She has also co-edited two essay collections; Broadcasting Modernism (University of Florida Press, 2010) and Pornotopias: Image, Desire, Apocalypse (Litteraria Pragensia, 2009). She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and has taught at universities in the UK, The Netherlands, and the USA.

Janice A. Lowe is a composer, poet and pianist. She is the author of LEAVING CLEpoems of nomadic dispersal (Miami University Press,) and the chapbook SWAM (Belladonna Series.) She composed the musicals Lil Budda, (Text by Stephanie L. Jones,) Sit-In at the Five & Dime, (Words by Marjorie Duffield) and Somewhere in Texas, (Book and Lyrics by Charles E. Drew, Jr.). Her works for musical theater have been performed extensively in New York City and regionally and have received developmental residencies from the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, National Alliance for Musical Theater, Voice and Vision and the Dramatists Guild, where she was a Jonathan Larson fellow. She has composed for the plays 12th and Clairmont by Jenni Lamb, The Super Starlet Shero Show by The Jones Twins and Door of No Return by Nehassaiu deGannes. She is the composer of Make Some Learned Noise, text by Randal Horton, an interactive poem with music, performed with the incoming freshman class, University of New Haven, 2015. Recently, she was commissioned to compose a song cycle based on the “Millie-Christine” poems, from the collection OLIO, by Tyehimba Jess. She is a co-founder of The Dark Room Collective and a founding member of absolute theater co. She has performed with the experimental bands w/o a net, HAGL and Digital Diaspora. She teaches musical theater songwriting workshops at White Bird Productions and has taught Poetry and Performance at Purchase College and at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics She holds an MFA in Musical Theater Writing from New York University-Tisch School of the Arts.

More info here: https://www.facebook.com/events/622287367972757/

Leora Fridman is an interdisciplinary artist, organizer, and educator living in California. She is the author of My Fault, selected by Eileen Myles for the 2015 CSU Poetry Center First Book Poetry Competition in addition to three chapbooks of poetry, prose, and translations.

Hilary Plum is the author of the work of nonfiction Watchfires (Rescue Press, 2016) and the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (FC2, 2013). She lives in Philadelphia.

* This event will take place from 6-7pm in Main Classroom 134. Immediately preceding the reading will be an Open House & Reception for the new CSU Poetry Center space. Details can be found here. Both events are free and open to the public.

Lo Kwa Mei-en is the author of Yearling (Alice James Books) and The Bees Make Money in the Lion (Cleveland State University Poetry Center). Two chapbooks are also forthcoming: The Romances from The Lettered Streets Press and Two Tales from Bloom Books. She is a Kundiman fellow from Singapore and Ohio, where she now lives and works in Cincinnati.

Martin Rock is the author of Residuum (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and Dear Mark (Brooklyn Arts Press), a chapbook response to the work of Mark Rothko. With Kevin Prufer and Martha Collins he edited the Unsung Masters volume Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press). His poetry and translations from the Japanese have appeared in Asymptote, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Conduit, Diagram, Forklift, Ohio, Best New Poets 2012, and other journals. Martin has held senior editorial positions at Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, and Epiphany, a literary journal, and he is Founding Editor of Loaded Bicycle, an online journal of poetry, art, and translation.

Philip Metres is the author of a number of books, including Sand Opera (2015), I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015), A Concordance of Leaves (2013), To See the Earth (2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007). His work has garnered two NEA fellowships, five Ohio Arts Council Grants, the George W. Hunt, S.J. Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, the Cleveland Arts Prize and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. He is professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

Lauren Shapiro holds degrees from Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Easy Math (Sarabande, 2013), which was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Debut-litzer Prize for Poetry, as well as a chapbook of poems, Yo-Yo Logic (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2011). With Kevin González, she co-edited The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry  (Rescue Press, 2013).  She has translated creative work from Spanish, Italian, Vietnamese, and Arabic into English and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Carnegie Mellon University.

Kiki Petrosino is the author of two books of poetry: Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013) and Fort Red Border (2009), both from Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, Tin House and elsewhere. She is founder and co-editor of Transom, an independent on-line poetry journal. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.

James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye. Star in the Eye was selected for the Fence Modern Poets Series and included in the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets series. A former Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong, he has taught at Nebraska Wesleyan University, the University of Chicago’s Committee on Creative Writing, Columbia College Chicago’s MFA Program in Poetry, DePaul University, and as a poet-in-residence in the Chicago public schools, where he received The Poetry Center of Chicago’s Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Morgan Parker is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books 2015). Her poetry and essays have been featured in numerous publications as well as anthologized in Why I Am Not a Painter (Argos Books 2011) and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books 2015). Morgan is Cave Canem graduate fellow, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and poetry editor for The Offing. She also co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Brooklyn.

Emily Pettit is the author of Goat in the Snow. Her poems have been featured in the Academy of American Poets/Poem a Day Series, Fence, Open Letters, Verse Daily, and the Huffington Post. She is a writer, visual artist, teacher, and an editor for Factory Hollow Press and jubilat. She teaches at Elms College.