MAY 6 — Kimberly Alidio leads a discussion of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s “Texas”, followed by a short reading of her own work.

Kimberly Alidio (she/they) is an educator, historian, and author of four books of poetry, including why letter ellipses (selva oscura); : once teeth bones coral : (Belladonna*), a Lambda Literary Award Finalist; and after projects the resound (Black Radish). Their most recent book, Teeter, won the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and will be published in Fall 2023. She teaches in Bard’s Language and Thinking Program, Prison Initiative, Early College, and Milton Avery School of the Arts. With their partner, the poet Stacy Szymaszek, they live on unceded Munsee and Muhheaconneok/ Mohican lands, otherwise known as New York’s Upper Hudson Valley.

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MAY 13 — Charles Bernstein leads a discussion of Larry Eigner’s “Again Dawn”, followed by a short reading of his own work.

Charles Bernstein is the winner of the 2019 Bollingen Prize for Near/Miss (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and for lifetime achievement in American Poetry. He is the author of Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, April 2021) and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016). In 2020, Roof Books published The Course, a collaboration with Ted Greenwald. He lives in Brooklyn. More info @ http://writing.upenn.edu/epc

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MAY 20 — Norma Cole leads a discussion of William Wordsworth’s “Two-Part Prelude” along with John Ashbery’s “Streakiness”, followed by a short reading of her own work.

Norma Cole is a poet, visual artist and translator. Her most recent book of poetry is Fate News. Other books include Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008, Spinoza in Her Youth, To Be at Music: Essays & Talks and Actualities, her collaboration with Marina Adams. Her translations from French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (edited & translated by Cole), and Jean Daive’s White Decimal. Her visual work has been shown at the Miami University Art Museum, [2nd floor projects] in San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum, and most recently her film “By the Turning Bridge” at Arion Press and NIAD. A book of her drawings called Drawings just appeared from Further Other Book Works.

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JUNE 3 — Tonya Foster leads a discussion of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Life of Lincoln West” along with a look at “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee”, followed by a short reading of her own work.

Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist, and Black feminist scholar. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and co-editor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She is a poetry editor at Fence Magazine and a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto. A recipient of awards from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, the Creative Capital Foundation, Macdowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Ford and Mellon Foundations, among others, Dr. Foster serves as the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.

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JUNE 10 — Aditi Machado leads a discussion of Nathaniel Mackey’s “Said to Have Been Heard to Say Hush”, followed by a short reading of her own work.

Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her second book of poems, Emporium (Nightboat, 2020), received the James Laughlin Award. Her other works include the poetry collection Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017), an essay pamphlet titledThe End (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), a translation from the French of Farid Tali’s novella Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016), and several poetry chapbooks. Her writing appears in journals like The Chicago Review, Lana Turner, The Rumpus, Volt, and Western Humanities Review, among others. She works as an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati.

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JULY 8 — Jena Osman leads a discussion of Don Mee Choi’s “Woe Are You?”, followed by a short reading of her own work.

Jena Osman’s books of poems include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Corporate Relations (Burning Deck, 2014), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She was a 2006 Pew Fellow in the Arts and has received grants for her poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Howard Foundation, and the Fund for Poetry. She co-founded and edited the literary magazine Chain with Juliana Spahr for twelve years. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program in the English Department at Temple University.

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