Come hear these four poets hailing from the shores of Lake Superior, mid-coast Maine, Missouri, and a teardrop camper read work encompassing body, place, gender, pain, and hope.
Watershed Reading
Oliver Baez Bendorf is the 2017-2018 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His first book, The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State U., 2015), was selected by Mark Doty for the Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation and Vermont Studio Center, and his work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, diode, Indiana Review, jubilat, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Iowa, his other home is a teardrop camper.
Heather Derr-Smith is a poet with four books, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008), Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016) and Thrust (Persea Books, 2017). She is founder and director of Cuvaj se/Take Care, a nonprofit supporting writers in conflict zones and post-conflict recovery zones.
Crystal S. Gibbins grew up on the islands of Lake of the Woods, Minnesota/Ontario. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection NOW/HERE (Holy Cow! Press) and the editor of Split Rock Review. Her work has been featured widely in literary journals, such as Cincinnati Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, H_NGM_N, Minnesota Review, and Prairie Schooner. Crystal received her PhD in English from the University of Nebraska, with concentrations in 20th and 21st Century American Poetry and Environmental Literature. She lives and writes on the south shore of Lake Superior in Washburn, Wisconsin.
PLAN YOUR VISIT
Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.
Our galleries are open Tuesday through Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday noon to 5pm, and other programs take place throughout the week. Please check the events calendar and education section for details.
Galleries are closed on Saturday, April 6 due to Fermat's Last Theater's performance of Mother Courage Alone.