Sheltering with Poems Reading

Join us on July 17, 2021 at 7pm to celebrate the publication of Sheltering with Poems, a gathering of Wisconsin poets building durable rooms of meaning and hope. In his foreword to the anthology, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Max Garland “modestly” proposes “adding poets and artists to the list of essential workers.” While not as vital or heroic as nurses, doctors, teachers and “those among us doing what needs to be done day after day,” Garland says poetry can relate the “ongoing news of what happens in the hearts and minds of ordinary people facing extraordinary peril. News from the front lines of feeling.”

The poets in this anthology are nurses and lawyers, teachers and scientists, artists, students, booksellers and business owners. Their poems speak to all of us going through this pandemic together.

“If there is shelter in poetry, or art itself, it’s a movable shelter,” Garland writes, “an ancient antigen, shelter that preserves, but also reinvigorates; comforts, but also reawakens our latent capacity for healing.”

This event will be livestreamed on Facebook and on our YouTube channel (don't miss another livestream by subscribing to our channel now).

Angela Voras-Hills

Angela Voras-Hills lives with her family in Milwaukee, WI. Her first book, Louder Birds (Pleiades 2020), was chosen by Traci Brimhall for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. Other work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets, Hayden's Ferry Review, Memorious, and New Ohio Review, among other journals and anthologies. She has received grants from The Sustainable Arts Foundation and Key West Literary Seminar, as well as a fellowship at Writers' Room of Boston.

Ron Czerwien

Ron Czerwien is the owner of Avol’s Books, LLC. His poems have appeared online and in a number of print journals. Ron serves on the board of The Council for Wisconsin Writers. His chapbook, “a little rain, a little more,” was published in 2018 by Bent Paddle Press.

Lora Keller

Basketball is Lora’s current obsession. In fact, her first poetry collection, Meticulous Ardor: Meditations On Basketball and the Milwaukee Bucks, is devoted to it. After growing up in Kaukauna, Wisconsin, Lora lived in New York City and Kansas City and now has made Milwaukee her home. After college, she was a scriptwriter, public relations executive, educator, small business owner, and property developer and now writes poetry full-time. Her poems are published widely and have earned numerous awards including a Pushcart Prize nomination. She also stitches fiber art using words, paper and fabric which has been exhibited and sold at many regional art galleries.

Scott Lowery

Scott Lowery recently moved to the Milwaukee area with his wife and cats, after spending the past 25 years in Minnesota. Lowery's chapbook Empty-handed won the 2013 Emergence Chapbook Prize from Red Dragonfly Press (Northfield, MN). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, Naugatuck River Review, Third Wednesday, North American Review, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Great River Review, Water-Stone Review, and The Teacher's Voice. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for several national poetry prizes. As a 30-year veteran of public school teaching, Scott has read his poems and presented writing workshop sessions to young writers from grades 3 to 12. Since retiring, he has coordinated the Teen Voices Project, a series of writing workshops for Winona teen poets, culminating in a group reading and a print collection of their work (Soundings, Book Shelf Editions).

Ae Hee Lee

Ae Hee Lee was born in the Republic of Korea, raised in Peru, and now resides in Wisconsin. She earned an MFA at the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she has served as associate editor for Cream City Review. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming at Poetry, Narrative, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and The Journal, among others.

Katrin Talbot

Australian-born Katrin Talbot’s collection The Waiting Room for the Imperfect Alibis is forthcoming from Kelsay Books and she has 7 chapbooks*, two Pushcart Prize nominations and quite a few chickens. She also makes noise on the viola in the Madison Symphony Orchestra.

*Wrong Number is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press and she has six other chapbooks, The Blind Lifeguard and Freeze-Dried Love, from Finishing Line Press, Attached: Poetry of Suffix, The Little Red Poem & noun’d, verb, from dancing girl press, and St. Cecilia’s Daze, from Parallel Press.

Photo by Ariana Karp

Angie Trudell Vasquez

Angela (Angie) Trudell Vasquez is a 2nd and 3rd generation Mexican-American writer, editor, publisher, and the former Poet Laureate of Madison, Wisconsin (2020-2024). She holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Finishing Line Press published her collections, In Light, Always Light, in May 2019, and My People Redux, in January 2022. In 2021, she attended the Macondo Writers Workshop started by Sandra Cisneros, and became a fellow, also known as a Macondista. In 2020 she published and co-edited a poetry anthology of Wisconsin poets, Through This Door, through her small press Art Night Books.

Portrait by Nicole Taylor

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, visual artist and translator. Her most recent poetry collections are I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada/ A Goldfish Buys You Nothing (Editorial Yaugurú, Uruguay, 2023). Her translations include Love Poems by Idea Vilariño and The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia (University of Pittsburgh Press). She is the Zona Gale Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Lee Kathryn Hodge

Lee Kathryn Hodge is an artist and writer living in Milwaukee. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Granta, Thrush, Heavy Feather Review, Euphony, Heartwood, The William & Mary Review, Clinch Mountain, After Hours, Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, Mouth, and The Tulane Review where she was the Spring 2020 short fiction contest winner. She is the current Associate Editor of the Cream City Review.

Susan Firer

Susan Firer’s sixth and most recent book, The Transit of Venus, was named as an "Outstanding Work of Poetry” by the Wisconsin Library Association. Her previous books have been awarded the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, the Posner Award, and the Backwaters Prize. She is a recipient of a Milwaukee County Artist Fellowship, a Wisconsin Board Fellowship, and the Lorine Niedecker Award. She is a recipient of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Distinguished Alumnus Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry.

Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Ms. (Magazine), Chicago Tribune, Chicago Review, jubilat, Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, and in numerous anthologies. The University of Nebraska Press will be reissuing her fourth book,The Laugh We Make When We Fall, in 2021.

Sheltering with Poems Reading

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