Last month we celebrated Best New Poetry from the Midwest, and this month we're celebrating the best from the Midwest and well beyond, with stellar readers from Wisconsin, Colorado, Missouri, and California.
T Banks, Aliki Barnstone, Julie Carr & Jacques Rancourt
T Banks is a community organizer, a mental wellness advocate, poet and playwright. After graduating with a degree in English Creative writing, Banks has successfully used his art through plays and poetry to address Racism, Transphobia, and Abelism. As a Black Trans, Queer person with a disability, T believes the movement for Black Lives must be intersectional and deeply connected to the struggle to end Patriarchy, specifically as it manifests as violence against Black Trans folks. His work addresses the need for the Black liberation movement to be accessible to those with mental wellness challenges and / or physical disabilities as well fights for the ability of these populations to regain their autonomy in a capitalistic society.
Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, editor, and visual artist. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently: Dwelling (Sheep Meadow, 2016), Bright Body (White Pine, 2011), and Dear God Dear, Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 2009). She translated of The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation (W.W. Norton, 2006). Her first book of poems, The Real Tin Flower (Crowell-Collier, 1968), was published when she was 12 years old, with a forward by Anne Sexton. In 2014, Carnegie-Mellon University Press reissued her book, Madly in Love, as a Carnegie-Mellon Classic Contemporary. Her poems have appeared in such journals as New Letters, Los Angeles Times, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Southern Review, Smartish Pace, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Among her awards are a Senior Fulbright Fellowship in Greece, the Silver... Read More
Julie Carr is the author of six books of poetry, most recently 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the author of two prose works: Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2013) and Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta, 2017). With Jeffrey Robinson she is the co-editor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press, 2015). A chapbook of prose, “The Silence that Fills the Future,” was released as a free pdf from Essay Press: http://www.essaypress.org/ep-19/
Carr’s co-translation of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory is due out from Commune Editions in 2018, as will a mixed-genre work, Reallife: An Installation. Also to be published in 2018 in her book of critical essays, Someone Shot my Book (University of... Read More
Jacques J. Rancourt was raised in rural Maine. He is the author of Brocken Spectre (forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2021), Novena (winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize, Pleiades Press, 2017), and the chapbook, In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). He has held poetry fellowships and scholarships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He currently lives in San Francisco where he works as a middle school principal.
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