TINY TALKS is a monthly series of short talks on poetry at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop this fall. September's theme is FAILURE.

ZOË BODZAS, "Nothing that These Notes Are"

Zoë Bodzas recently graduated from Hamilton College, where she studied creative writing and linguistics. She was the recipient of the 2016 Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Prize. Recently, her poetry has appeared in Big Lucks and Leveler. Zoë lives in Brooklyn these days. 

CAOLAN MADDEN, "I Failed at Failure"

Caolan Madden is finally the right kind of failure because her institutional funding ran out and she has started publishing her writing for free on various websites. She is still, however, affiliated with Rutgers University, where she is finishing a dissertation on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women poets--but she may never finish, because she accidentally killed the Dissertation Finishing Plant she inherited from another doctoral student. Her three-year-old daughter could fail out of preschool any minute now. 

SEAN SINGER, "Perfection is the Enemy of the Good"

Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; and Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and two chapbooks, Passport (Beard of Bees Press, 2007) and Keep Right on Playing Through the Mirror Over the Water (Beard of Bees Press, 2010). He has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers-Newark. He drives a taxi in New York City.

SARA JANE STONER, "Failing at Subjects: Poetry and the Living Idea"

Sara Jane Stoner is a PhD student at CUNY Graduate Center working on a dissertation between pedagogy, queer theory, and contemporary poetics. Her first book, EXPERIENCE IN THE MEDIUM OF DESTRUCTION (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2015) was nominated for a Lambda Award, and she currently edits reviews for the Poetry Project Newsletter.