Fall 2007 Reading Series
(Click here here for Spring ’08 listings)
The From the Fishouse reading series is generously supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Residential Life and Academic Affairs Offices at Bowdoin College.
Gregory Pardlo & Gabriel Welsch: Thursday, September 6, 2007
7:30 p.m., Bowdoin College, Donald B. MacMillan House, 5 McKeen Street, Brunswick, Maine
Gregory Pardlo is a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in poetry and has received fellowships from The New York Times, the MacDowell Colony, the Seaside Institute, and Cave Canem, and has been Visiting Emerging Poet at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Va. His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Calalloo, Lyric, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, Volt, Black Issues Book Review, and on National Public Radio. He is the recipient of the Lotos Club Foundation Award for Creative Writing and his volume of translations from the Danish poet Niels Lyngsoe, Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace, was published in 2004. His first book of poetry, Totem (American Poetry Review, September 2007), was chosen by Brenda Hillman for the 2007 American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize. He is Assistant Professor of English at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.
Gabriel Welsch’s first collection of poems, Dirt and All Its Dense Labor, was published by Word Tech Editions in summer 2006. His poems, stories, essays and reviews have appeared in more than fifty different magazines and journals, including Harvard Review, New Letters, Spoon River Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Georgia Review, Ascent, Missouri Review, and Mid-American Review. In 2003, he received a Pennsylvania Arts Council Individual Artist’s Fellowship for Fiction, and in 2002 was the inaugural Thoreau Poet in Residence at the Toledo Botanical Garden. He lives in Pennsylvania, where he is assistant vice president of marketing at Juniata College.
Sebastian Matthews: Friday, September 14, 2007
7:00 p.m., Bowdoin College, Schwartz Outdoor Leadershp Center, Junction of College St. Harpswell Road, Brunswick, Maine
Sebastian Matthews, a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College and edits Rivendell, a place-based literary journal. He is the author of the memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps, and co-editor, with Stanley Plumly, of Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews. His poems have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, Post Road, Seneca Review, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Matthews was a recent Bernard De Voto Fellow in Nonfiction at Bread Loaf. His chapbook, Coming to Flood, was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005 and a collection of poems, We Generous, was published by Red Hen Press in February 2007.
Tina Chang & Ravi Shankar: Thursday, November 15, 2007
7:30 p.m., Bowdoin College, Donald B. MacMillan House, 5 McKeen Street, Brunswick, Maine
Tina Chang, the author of Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004), received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in American Poet, Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, Sonora Review, among others. Her poems have been anthologized in Identity Lessons (Penguin Putnum, 1999), Poetry Nation (Vehicule Press, 1998), Asian American Literature (McGraw-Hill, 2001), Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004), and in Poetry 30: Poets in Their Thirties. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Van Lier Foundation and has held writing fellowships from Fundación Valparaíso, The MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Villa Montalvo.
Ravi Shankar is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University. His first book of poems, Instrumentality, was published in 2004 by Word Press. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Descant, LIT, Crowd, The Cortland Review, Catamaran, The Indiana Review, Western Humanities Review, The Iowa Review, and The AWP Writer’s Chronicle, among other publications. He has been a commentator on NPR, Wesleyan Radio, and KKUP’s Out of Our Minds. He has read at such venues as The National Arts Club, Columbia University, KGB, and the Cornelia Street Café, has held residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry.