AWP Off-site Kick-Off Poetry Reading

Join us for a reading with Erika Meitner, Alicia Jo Rabins, Keetje Kuipers, Airea D. Matthews, Tess Taylor, & Rachel Zucker.

(Note: this is the first of two separate readings at The Stacks tonight, so we will be prompt & will move the party next door afterwards!)

Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), Copia (BOA Editions, 2014), and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. Meitner is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, composer, performer and Torah teacher whose work explores the intersection of ancient wisdom texts with everyday life. Rabins is the author of Fruit Geode (Augury Books), a finalist for the Jewish Book Award, and Divinity School (American Poetry Review), selected by C.D. Wright for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in 2015. She is the creator of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, a chamber-rock opera about spirituality and finance. Rabins is also a coffee drinker, plant lover, DIY bar/bat mitzvah tutor, and ritualist. She tours internationally as a violinist, singer and performer from her home base in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband and two kids. You can call her Alicia.

Keetje Kuipers’ third collection, All Its Charms, will be published in 2019. Her poems have appeared in over a hundred magazines, as well as the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies, read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, and featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. Previously a Wallace Stegner fellow, Bread Loaf fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, Kuipers is currently Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest. She lives with her family on an island in the Salish Sea.

Airea D. Matthews is the author of Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Best American Poets, Harvard Review, American Poet, and elsewhere. She was awarded a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, a Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Kresge Literary Arts award as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo and The James Merrill House. One of Matthews’s current projects includes a cross-genre book that explores politics, poverty, race and class. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College.

Tess Taylor is the author of The Forage House and Work & Days, which was named one of 2016’s best books of poetry by the New York Times. She was a Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and was most recently Anne Spencer Writer in Residence at Randolph College. She is also the poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered.

Rachel Zucker is the author of ten books, including the forthcoming SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019), MOTHERs, The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014) and Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2016, Zucker was a Bagley Wright Lecturer and wrote and delivered a series of talks on poetry, photography, confessionalism, motherhood, and the ethics of representing real people in art. These talks—now essays—will be published as a book called The Poetics of Wrongness in 2020. Zucker has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Fellowship, and residencies at The MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. Zucker is the founder and host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People). She lives in NYC with her husband and three sons and teaches poetry at NYU.