Poetry Presenters

More presenters will be added in the weeks to come.
The detailed session schedule will be available in late August.

 

Poetry Presenters

 
 

Michael Earl Craig

Michael Earl Craig is from Dayton, Ohio, home of the gas mask and the mood ring. He is the author of Iggy Horse; Woods and Clouds Interchangeable; Talkativeness; Thin Kimono; Yes, Master; Can You Relax in My House; and the chapbook Jombang Jet. He lives in Montana, where he makes his living as a farrier. He was the 2015-2017 Poet Laureate of Montana.

www.wavepoetry.com

In Michael Earl Craig’s sixth book, poems resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar, whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the “Italy of God,” or the milking rituals in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow. Not merely absurdist, Iggy Horse is a book that articulates the sadness and strangeness of American life with the poetic observations of true satire.

 

Richard Meier

Richard Meier has published five books of poetry: A Duration (Wave 2023), February March April April, In the Pure Block of the Whole Imaginary, Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar, and Terrain Vague, selected by Tomaz Salamun for the Verse Prize and published by Verse Press in 2001. In recent years he has practiced and taught workshops on writing and walking and other daily and durational writing practices. He is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Carthage College and lives in Somers and Madison, Wisconsin.

www.wavepoetry.com

In the poem-essays that comprise A Duration, writing is a physical act where writing and lived experience support one another in bodies—animal, plant, mineral, and word bodies—that are injured and heal, that die and continue in new forms, playing new roles. Here, in his fifth book, Richard Meier transmutes years of daily practices of attention—be it to a line spoken by Lear’s Fool, a train to Kingston, or “red inside green stem below eight white petals in a spiral with space between them attached to the yellow center”—into mesmerizing trajectories through an always unfolding present.

 

Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, including Nightingale, Appropriate: A Provocation, and, most recently, West: A Translation. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she is a distinguished professor.

www.paisleyrekdal.com

In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. The result is West: A Translation—an unflinching hybrid collection of poems and essays that draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad’s completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943). 

 

Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl is a playwright, essayist and poet. Her plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, The Clean House, Passion Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Melancholy Play; For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday, The Oldest Boy, Stage Kiss, Dear Elizabeth, Eurydice, Orlando, Late: a cowboy song, and a translation of Three Sisters. She has been a two-time Pulitzer prize finalist and a Tony award nominee. Her plays have been produced on and off-Broadway, around the country, and internationally where they have been translated into over fifteen languages. Most recently a play adaptation of her book, Letters From Max, premiered at Signature Theatre. Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. She has received the Steinberg award, the Sam French award, the Susan Smith Blackburn award, the Whiting award, the Lily Award, a PEN award for mid-career playwrights, and the MacArthur award. Her two books of poetry are published by Copper Canyon Press, and her collaboration with poet Max Ritvo, Letters from Max, was published by Milkweed. Her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was a Times notable book of the year, and she most recently published Smile: A Memoir which was listed by Time magazine as a must read book of 2021. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and she lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Photo Credit: Gregory Costanzo

www.sarahruhlplaywright.com