Readings by:
Mary Austin Speaker
Sara Jane Stoner
Kyle Dargan
Justin Petropoulos
Mary Austin Speaker is a poet and book designer. Her first full-length collection of poems, Ceremony, was selected by Matthea Harvey as winner of the 2012 Slope Editions book prize and was published in February 2013. She is the author of four chapbooks: In the End There Were Thousands of Cowboys (Menagerie Editions 2009), Abandoning the Firmament (Menagerie Editions 2010), The Bridge (Push Press 2011), and 20 Love Poems for 10 Months (Ugly Duckling Presse 2012), as well as a play, I AM YOU THIS MORNING YOU ARE ME TONIGHT, collaboratively written with her husband, the poet Chris Martin for the journal Bridge. She runs a tiny design studio in Minneapolis, and regularly designs books for Milkweed Editions, HarperCollins, Alice James Books and others.
Sara Jane Stoner is a writer, performer, and teacher who holds an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University and is pursuing a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center with a focus on performative writing pedagogy and the intersections of feminist and queer thinking, particularly in the context of contemporary experimental writing. She teaches at Brooklyn College and Cooper Union, and her first book, “Experience in the Medium of Destruction”, will be published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs in 2014. Amanda Davidson’s chapbook Arcanagrams: A Reckoning is forthcoming on Little Red Leaves’ Textile Series. Her fiction chapbook Apprenticeship (New Herring Press) was a finalist for the 2013 Calvino Prize. She is currently at work on a performance novel about the mystic Swedenborg.
Kyle G. Dargan is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently HONEST ENGINE (UGA, 2015) and LOGORRHEA DEMENTIA (UGA,2010). His debut, THE LISTENING (UGA 2004), won the 2003 Cave Canem Prize, and his second, BOUQUET OF HUNGERS (UGA 2007), was awarded the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in poetry. Dargan’s poems and non-fiction have appeared in publications such as Callaloo, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, The Newark Star-Ledger, Ploughshares, TheRoot.com, and Shenandoah. While a Yusef Komunyakaa fellow at Indiana University, he served as poetry editor for Indiana Review. He is the founding editor of Post No Illsmagazine and was most recently the managing editor of Callaloo.
Justin Petropoulos is the author of two collections of poetry, Eminent Domain (Marsh Hawk Press, 2011), selected by Anne Waldman for the 2010 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and<Legend> </Legend> (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013), a collaborative work with multimedia artist, Carla Gannis. His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Gulf Coast, Mandorla, Portland Review, and most recently in Spinning Jenny. He has an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University. Petropoulos is currently the site director of an after-school program for elementary age children and is an adjunct faculty member at New Jersey City University, where he teaches composition and creative writing.