Join writers of fiction and poetry on January 19, 2019 at 7 PM for ALL’s first Watershed Series in 2019! Featured poet Beatrice Szymkowiak newly arrived from Portland, Oregon, will be joined by beloved local Madison poet, Ron Czerwien, and current MFA students at UW-Madison, Alexis Sears and Danie Shokoohi. Beatrice will be reading from her new book, Red Zone, a poetry book for our times. Ron also has a new book out entitled, a little rain, a little more. Come support your local arts, buy books, get them signed by the writers, and meet emerging writers. Celebrate the new year with art!
The New Year Reading
For many years Ron hosted poetry readings and open mics at his used bookstore, Avol’s, and after it closed in 2012, at different venues in Madison. Ron’s poems have appeared online and in a number of print journals. He is the author of the chapbook, “A Ragged Tear Down The Middle Of Our Flag,” published in 2017 by locofo chaps, an imprint of Moria Books. His new chapbook, “a little rain, a little more,” was recently published by Bent Paddle Press. These days Ron continues to sell used and out-of-print books on the internet under the name Avol’s Books LLC. In his free time Ron creates collages that combine old advertising images and appropriated text to amuse his friends.
Alexis Sears is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University. She is originally from Palos Verdes, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Hopkins Review, PANK, the Texas Review, Passages North, and elsewhere.
Danie Shokoohi is a fiction candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison MFA program. Her fiction, poetry, and non-fiction have been previously published in Plain China Press, Vassar Review, Occulum, Hypertrophic Literary, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She was one the winners of the 2017 Ellis Review New Colossus Award and the 2018 winner of the Wasafiri Prize in Poetry. She is the press editor of Half Mystic Press.
Beatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American author. She was born in the North of France, a landscape scarred by the battles of WWI trench war. She immigrated to the United States in 2003 and lived in New Orleans, where she witnessed the human and environmental catastrophe caused by Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures. In 2017, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (Santa Fe, NM). She now pursues a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she also teaches. Beatrice is the winner of the 2017 Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Poetry Contest, and her poems have been published in magazines including the Berkeley Poetry Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, OmniVerse and the Portland Review. Exploratory and experimental, her poetry investigates the new environmental trajectory of the Anthropocene. Red Zone is the first chapter of her investigations, located at the... Read More
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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.
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