Thursday, October 10, 2013

Poetry Saves Lives

OCC invites you to the poetry festival "Poetry Saves Lives" from 12-3:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 16, in Room G240 of the Auburn Hills campus, 2900 Featherstone Road. The event features four accomplished poets who will give readings, followed by workshops and then a student open mic. The event is open and free but pre-registration is required. Email Studentlife@oaklandcc.edu to register.

A portion of the poets' fees were sponsored by Poets & Writers, a national organization for the promotion of the literary arts. The OCC Writers Block student organization will be selling festival T-shirts for $20 and buttons for $3 at the event to benefit InsideOut Literary Arts, a writing program for children in Detroit. Click here, for more information. 

Featured poets:

Airea “Dee” Matthews:
She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and is currently a Zell Postgraduate Poetry Fellowship recipient at the University of Michigan where she earned her MFA. She resides in Detroit with her husband and four children, and is currently working on her first full-length poetry collection.


Sean Thomas Dougherty:
He is the author or editor of 13 books including the forthcoming All I Ask for Is Longing: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014 (BOA Editions), Scything Grace (2013 Etruscan Press), Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (2010 BOA Editions) and Broken Hallelujahs (2007 BOA Editions). His awards include two PA Council for the Arts Fellowships in poetry and a Fulbright Lectureship for poetry to the Balkans. Known for his electrifying performances, he has performed at hundreds of venues, universities and festivals across North America and Europe including the Lollapalooza Music Festival, the Detroit Art Festival, the South Carolina Literary Festival, the Old Dominion University Literary Festival, Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Maine, Sarah Lawrence College and more. His work has also been read on PBS radio in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester and Cleveland. Sean currently works in a pool hall, and gives readings around the country.
 
Jamaal May:
A poet, editor, and educator from Detroit, where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. He is the author of Hum (Alice James Books, Nov 2013), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, and two poetry chapbooks (The God Engine and The Whetting of Teeth). His poems have been published widely in journals such as POETRY, Ploughshares, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and New England Review. Honors include the 2011-13 Stadler Fellowship from The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem and Callaloo. He teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.

Peter Markus:
He is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat, as well as three books of short fiction: Good, Brother, The Singing Fish, and We Make Mud. His stories have appeared widely in such magazines as Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Northwest Review, Massachusetts Review, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, etc. He was named a Kresge Arts in Detroit fellow in Literary Arts in 2012 and teaches as a poet-in-the-schools with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project of Detroit. A new book of fiction, The Fish and the Not Fish, is forthcoming in the Fall of 2014 from Dzanc Books.






 

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