The Watershed Reading Series is pleased to welcome award-winning poet Leila Chatti, Timothy Prolific Edwaujonte, and Donald Platt in our virtual series for an evening full of poems of the feminine and the divine, poems that are concerned with a spiritual connection to a lineage long past, and poems of how confront the end and how we hold our loved ones in their most needed hour. The event will be livestreamed on Facebook and followed by a Q&A with the poets as moderated by the Watershed Reading Series Director, I.S. Jones. It will also be available live on our YouTube channel.
November Reading
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors' Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Timothy Prolific Edwaujonte (formerly Veit Jones; pro/they/he) is a poet, writer, educator, genealogist, designer, healer, and organizer who synthesizes ancestral traditions, and Hip-Hop culture as an Afro-Indigenous folkloric praxis. Pro was a Riggio Fellow at The New School and is a graduate fellow at The Watering Hole. Prolific has published 3 books of poetry: Prolific, Musaic: 40 Days, 40 Nights, and synthesized their genealogy and spiritual practice to author Ofrenda para las ancestras. Timothy’s work has been featured in African Voices, The Inquisitive Eater, 12th Street, the graphic novel Gunplay, the Dancing While Black: 2012 – 2018 Community Syllabus, Greg G the Goldenchild’s song “Born Black,” and as a literary accompaniment to choreographer Sydnie L. Mosley’s “Cake.” Edwaujonte is the founder of the Owo Foro Adobe publishing and performance collaborative. Pro is from Uniondale (Long Island) and lives... Read More
Donald Platt is the author of seven volumes of poetry. His most recent book is One Illuminated Letter of Being, which will be published by Red Mountain Press on August 30th, 2020. His other books include Man Praying, Tornadoesque, Dirt Angels, My Father Says Grace, Cloud Atlas, and Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, Nation, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Iowa Review, and Yale Review, as well as many other national journals. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes. Three of his poems have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry series. He teaches in the MFA program at... Read More
The festival is also supported in part with additional funds from the Endres Mfg. Company Foundation, The Evjue Foundation, Inc., charitable arm of The Capital Times, the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation, and the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation.
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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.
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