Readings from Evie Shockley, Simone Wolff, Claudia Cortese, and Valerie Hsiung, plus POSSIBLE ADDITIONAL SPECIAL GUESTS!

Evie Shockley is the author of two books of poetry—the new black, winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, and a half-red sea—and a critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Her poetry and essays appear widely in journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2015 and Best American Experimental Writing 2015. Her work has also been honored and supported with the 2015 Stephen Henderson Award, the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Currently serving as creative editor on the Feminist Studies editorial collective, Shockley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Fresh out of Vanderbilt University’s MFA in poetry, Simone Wolff currently designs and edits for Coconut, Glad Fact, and TransGenre. Much of their poetry and prose lives a happy, if incorporeal, life on the internet.

Valerie Hsiung is the author of three full-length poetry collections: efg (exchange following and gene flow): a trilogy (Action Books, forthcoming 2016), incantation inarticulate (O Balthazar Press, 2013) and under your face (O Balthazar Press, 2013). Her writing can be found in print and digital publications, including American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Moonshot, New Delta Review, the PEN Poetry Series, RealPoetik and VOLT, among elsewhere. Born in July in Cincinnati, Ohio, Hsiung spent significant portions of her childhood in Las Vegas and is now based out of Brooklyn, New York.

Claudia Cortese is the author of two chapbooks—Blood Medals (Thrush Poetry Press, 2015), a collection of prose poems, and The Red Essay and Other Histories (Horse Less Press, 2015), a book of lyric essays. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, and Sixth Finch, among others. The daughter of Neapolitan immigrants, Cortese grew up in suburban Ohio and now lives in New Jersey, where she teaches at Montclair State University. Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), which explores a girl named Lucy, will be her first full-length collection.