From navigating "a sexual reality haunted by colonial ghosts," to the disabled body as time travel vehicle, to a 460-square mile area in France so toxic from war that it's uninhabitable 100 years later, these three writers explore difficult terrains with wit, hope, and compassion.
This reading is part of a special double header. Oscar Presents will be featuring Ron Czierwen + Kevin Ducey at 8 PM, immediately following this reading.
Chekwube Danladi is the 2018-19 Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She has received support from Callaloo, Kimbilio, The Vermont Studio Center, and Hedgebrook. Chekwube is also the associate prose editor with Honeysuckle Press. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Apogee, Black Warrior Review, jubilat, West Branch, and as part of the New Generation African Poets chapbook boxset. She was raised in Lagos, Nigeria, Washington, D.C., and West Baltimore.
Ellen Samuels is a queer disabled poet and professor in the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Winner of two Lambda Literary Awards, her most recent creative publications include a verse memoir, Hypermobilities published this year by The Operating System, and poems and prose in Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Brevity, Rogue Agent, and Mid-American Review. Find her on twitter @ehlastigirl.
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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