Dancing Girl Press: An Offsite AWP Reading

Dancing Girl Press is an indie press and design studio based in Chicago. Since 2004, the DGP Chapbook Series has been devoted to publishing innovative writing by women authors in handmade editions, as well as exploring the intersection of writing and the visual/book arts.

Please come to hear authors of recent chapbooks share their work:

Steffi Drewes is author of the poetry collection Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow (Kelsey Street Press, 2016) and four chapbooks, most recently New Animal (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in various journals and event series, including the 2018 Way Bay Poetry Assembly and postcard project at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She is also the recipient of writing and art residencies at Vermont Studio Center, The Desert House in California, and the Wassaic Project in New York. She works as a freelance writer and editor in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Laura Christina Dunn graduated from Northwestern University and holds and MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. She is the 2015 recipient of The Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Fugue, At Length, The Bear Deluxe, Fact-Simile, and Zocalo Public Square, among others. In 2015, her chapbook Spider Blue was published by Dancing Girl Press. She has released three full length folk albums with her band Laura Dunn and The Ghosts of Xmas Past. The Broken Planetarium has produced her folk operas The Snow Queen, Frankenstein: A Cabaret, Atlantis, Rosa Red, and the forthcoming Sirens of Coos Bay.

Shamala Gallagher is an Indian/Irish American poet and essayist. Her first book of poems is Late Morning When the World Burns (The Cultural Society, 2019) and she is also the author of the chapbook I Learned the Language of Barbs and Sparks No One Spoke (Dancing Girl Press, 2015). She has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, Kundiman, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and her writing has appeared in Poetry, The Rumpus, The Offing, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Athens, GA with her family.

Catie Hannigan is a queer poet and visual artist from Maine. She is the author of the chapbooks: MOON’S CABIN (dancing girl press, 2019), Water Fragments (Tammy Journal, 2017), and What Once Was There Is The Most Beautiful Thing (DIAGRAM, 2015). She has received fellowships from c3:initiative, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Stonecoast Writer’s Conference. She is the director of Meadow, a creative space for marginalized artists & writers. She teaches poetry at the Independent Publishing and Resource Center in Portland, OR. More of her work can be found at www.catiehannigan.com.

Alexandra Mattraw’s first book of poems, small siren, is available at Cultural Society (2018), and her second book is forthcoming from Cultural Society in early 2020. She is also the author of four chapbooks, including flood psalm (2017, Dancing Girl Press). A Bay Area Correspondence School member, her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, Jacket2, Interim, The Poetry Project, and VOLT. In Oakland, Alexandra curates an art-centric writing and performance series called Lone Glen, now in its eighth year.

Alanna Rae is a poet and library assistant, currently residing in San Diego. She received her M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she was awarded the William Dickey Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in the San Diego Poetry Annual, the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, and One Sentence Poems, among other publications. Her chapbook, Imaginary Numbers, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Her nonfiction book, Consensuality, was published by Microcosm Publishing under the pen name Helen Wildfell.

Kimberly Reyes is a poet and essayist who has received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Columbia University, Callaloo, and San Francisco State University, among other places. Her full-length poetry book Running to Stand Still is forthcoming from Omnidawn in October.

Valerie Witte is the author of a game of correspondence (Black Radish Books) and three chapbooks, most recently The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (forthcoming from the Operating System), a collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal. She has been the recipient of residencies at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences; La Porte Peinte in Noyers, France; and Ragdale Foundation. She is a founding member of the Bay Area Correspondence School and, in her daytime hours, edits books in Portland. Learn more at valeriewitte.com.