Poetry Presenters

Poets will be reading on Saturday, September 28 starting at 2:00 p.m. at the Harbor Springs Public Library. See the schedule for times of each reading.

CAConrad

Photo Credit: Augusto Cascales

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest books are Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return and AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration. The Book of Frank is now available in nine different languages. Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tic for the Future Wilderness, and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. With Robert Dewhurst and Joshua Beckman, they co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. In 2022, Augusto Cascales made a film of their play, The Obituary Show. They recently had their first solo exhibition at Fluent Gallery in Santander, Spain, titled “13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return.” They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them online at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88.

  • Following their book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (winner of the PEN and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry), CAConrad's Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return shifts its attention from the previous book’s focus on communing with animals who are extinct toward communicating and caring for animals still living among us.

    Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, these poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote with animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are uninhibited and mysterious as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.

Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang has written several books of poetry, including The Trees Witness Everything, and a nonfiction book, Dear Memory. Her poetry collection OBIT was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. It was also long-listed for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Chang has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Literature Award. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the director of Poetry@Tech.

  • A new collection of poetry inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, exploring topics of feminism, art, depression, and grief, by the author of the prizewinning collection Obit.

    Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.

    With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang’s new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.

Marilyn Chin

Marilyn Chin is an award-winning poet and her works have become Asian American classics and are taught all over the world. She has published six books of poetry. Her newest book of poems is Sage. Her best hits collection: A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems is now in paperback. She has won numerous awards, including the Ruth Lilly Prize , the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the United States Artist Foundation Award, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, two NEAs, the Stegner Fellowship, A Lannan fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, a Fulbright Award to Taiwan, and others. She has translated the works of Ai Qing, Gozo Yoshimasu, Ho Xuan Huong and others and is presently working on translating the works of female Daoist adepts of the Tang dynasty. Presently, she is the Holmes Visiting Poet at Princeton. She also serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

  • A rebellious, refined, provocative, and audacious volume from award-winning poet Marilyn Chin.

    In her galvanizing sixth collection of poems, Marilyn Chin once again turns moral outrage into unforgettable art. A rambunctious take on our contemporary condition, Sage shifts skillfully in tone and register from powerful poems on social justice and the pandemic to Daoist wild girl satire.

    A self-described "activist-subversive-radical-immigrant-feminist-transnational-Buddhist-neoclassical-nerd poet," Chin is always reinventing herself. In Sage, she sings fearless identity anthems, pulls farcical details from an old diary, and confronts the disturbing rise in violence against Asian Americans. Leaping between colloquialisms and vivid imagery, anger and humor, she merges the personal and political with singular, resilient spirit.

    Whether she is spinning tall tales, mixing Chinese poems with hip-hop rhymes, reinventing lovelorn folk songs with a new-world anxiety, or penning a raucous birthday poem, a heartrending elegy, or an "un-gratitude" prayer, Chin offers dazzling surprises at every turn.

Kaecey McCormick

Originally from New England, Kaecey McCormick now writes poetry and prose in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of Sleeping with Demons and Pixelated Tears, winner of the 2023 Connecticut Poetry Prize, past poet laureate for the city of Cupertino, California, and an instructor at The Writers Studio. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in different literary journals, including The Pinch, Clockhouse, Jabberwock Review, Pedestal Magazine, and Pine Hills Review. When not writing, you can find Kaecey hiking up a mountain, painting, or reading a book. Connect at kaeceymccormick.com.

  • Sleeping with Demons includes poems that examine the intersection of mental health and feminism using different poetic lenses, personas, forms, and styles. Through an exploration of loss, betrayal, violence, and the generational transmission of dysfunction, McCormick offers a voice to the emotional and physical encounters of one version of the feminine experience.