VIRTUAL: A Night of Poetry

Please join us for a night of poetry with authors Robin Rosen Chang, The Curator's Notes, Lara Egger, How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away With It, Tiana Nobile, Cleave, and J.C. Todd, Beyond Repair! Register on Eventbrite!

About The Curator's Notes:

A gorgeously deft book, The Curator's Notes dares to question the Edenic. It asks, why not take the knowledge at hand hanging like "plump, purple orbs...begging to be eaten..."? And what can we grow with states of paradise being ever fleeting? This curator is a custodian of both specific and collective heritage, connecting daughter to mother to grandmother to wife to husband to the backyard garden to that garden of old where, as in the womb, knowing is limited and inevitable. In her sensual and tender book, Robin Rosen Chang has taken care to graciously offer us lyrics that swirl around and beyond our expectations until we accept both the churning waters and the radiant flight of circling birds as part of the story of life moving all too swiftly with and ultimately toward "the loam -/sand, silt, and clay."

-Vievee Francis

Originally from Philadelphia, Robin Rosen Chang has lived in several parts of the U.S. and abroad.  Her poetry appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, Cream City Review, American Literary Review, The Cortland Review, North American Review, Zone 3, and other journals and anthologies. She earned an  MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College as well as a Master's in City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master's in Teaching ESL from Kean University. She teaches college-level English as a Second Language and is a private tutor. 

About How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away With It:

Wrestling with desire, shame, and the complications of attempting to resist one’s own nature, How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It offers a tragicomic tour of a heart in midlife crisis. Populated by unruly angels, earthbound astronauts, xylophones, wordplay, and glitter glue, these wildly associative poems transform the world line by line, image by image. Part confessional, part kitsch, and often self-deprecating, this debut collection offers an honest and tender exploration of love’s necessary absurdity. Lara Egger asks: Who put the end in crescendo, the over in lover? Are metaphors always reliable witnesses? Why does the past sleep with us when we hope the person beside us is the future?

Lara Egger is a Boston-based poet. The recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize, and a two-time Pushcart nominee, her work has appeared in Verse Daily, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, the Laurel Review, Washington Square Review, Salt Hill, The Pinch, and elsewhere.

About Cleave:

In her debut collection, Tiana Nobile grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience. In conversation with psychologist Harry Harlow's monkey experiments and utilizing fragments of a highly personal cache of documents from her own adoption, these poems explore dislocation, familial relationships, and the science of love and attachment.

A Rona Jaffe Foundation award winner, Nobile is a glimmering new talent. Cleave attempts to unknot the complexities of adoptee childhood, revealing a nature of opposites--"the child cleaved to her mother / the child cleaved from her mother"--while reckoning with the histories that make us.

Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee poet. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, MAT in elementary and special education from the University of New Orleans, and MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. Tiana is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Kundiman fellow, and a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, she is the author of the chapbook, The Spirit of the Staircase (2017). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. Currently, she lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she works for an arts education nonprofit.

J.C. Todd is author of The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press, 2018), a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award finalist. Other books include What Space This Body (Wind, 2008), two chapbooks and collaborative artist books On Foot/By Hand and FUBAR (Lucia Press, 2018, 2016). Winner of the Rita Dove Poetry Prize, she holds fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Leeway Foundation, Ragdale, Ucross, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Currently a poet with the Dodge Poetry Program, she has taught at Bryn Mawr College and in the MFA Program at Rosemont and holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.