Visiting Writers Series

Stuart Ross is an acclaimed and award-winning author of 20+ books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Mr. Ross’ most recent works include the memoir “The Book of Grief and Hamburgers,” winner of the 2023 Trillium Book Award; the poetry collection “The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky;” and the short story collection “I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub.” “A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent” won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry; “Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew” won the Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Jewish Fiction; and “Buying Cigarettes for the Dog” won the Relit Award for Short Fiction. In 2018, Mr. Ross received the Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contributions to Canadian literature. Mr. Ross teaches at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies and has visited classrooms across Canada to read and lead workshops. His poetry has been translated into Nynorsk, French, Spanish, Russian, Slovene, and Estonian, and he runs the Feed Dog Book imprint for surrealist poetry at Anvil Press and the 1366 Books imprint for experimental fiction at Guernica Editions. He has performed sound poetry, solo and with musicians, for decades. Active in Canadian micropress since the mid-1970s, Mr. Ross lives in Cobourg, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and blogs infrequently at bloggamooga.blogspot.ca.

The Oxeye Reader Milwaukee Publication Party is an amazing group of poets from Milwaukee and surroundings areas, including some old friends, who are celebrating the publication of the new Oxeye Reader, a journal focusing on one city at a time, guest-edited by Jenny Gropp and Laura Solomon and published by Jordan Dunn’s Oxeye Press.

The reading will feature:

• Peter Burzynski
• Brenda Cárdenas
• Bryon Cherry
• Lewis Freedman
• Annie Grizzle
• Mauricio Kilwein Guevara
• Roberto Harrison
• Ae Hee Lee
• Richard Meier
• Sam Pekarske
• Antonio Vargas-Nieto

Credit: Ann Kingsbury

Jessica Alexander’s novella, “None of This Is an Invitation” (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) is forthcoming from Astrophil Press in summer 2023. Her story collection, “Dear Enemy,” was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her collaborative project (co-written with Vi Khi Nao) “That Woman Could Be You” came out with BlazeVox in April 2022. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Fence, Black Warrior Review, PANK, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. She lives in Louisiana where she teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Vi Khi Nao is the author of many books and is known for her work spanning poetry, fiction, play, film, and interdisciplinary collaborations. She was born in Long Khánh, Vietnam and immigrated to the United States at a young age. Her forthcoming novel, “The Italy Letters,” is scheduled for publication by Melville House in 2024. In the same year, she will release a co-authored manuscript titled, “The Six Tones of Water” with Sun Yung Shin, through Ricochet. She is the author of seven poetry collections and of the short stories collection, “A Brief Alphabet of Torture” (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), and the novel, “Swimming with Dead Stars.” She won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014 for her collection, “The Old Philosopher.” The fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute, her work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration. She was the 2022 recipient of the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.

Jared Stanley is a poet and writer who often collaborates with artists. He is the author of four collections of poetry, “So Tough,” “EARS,” “The Weeds,” and “Book Made of Forest,” as well as many chapbooks and pamphlets, most recently “The Blurry Hole” (with Sameer Farooq, Artspeak, 2022) and “SHALL” (Black Rock Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bennington Review, Harvard Review, VOLT, Folder Magazine, and many others. His awards include The Saturnalia Prize, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellowship (with Sameer Farooq), a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, as well as fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council and the Center for Art + Environment. Recent collaborative art exhibitions have shown at the Atheneum Art and Music Library (La Jolla), in collaboration with Matthew Hebert, and at the Lilley Museum (Reno), in collaboration with Sameer Farooq. He teaches in the MFA Program in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno and lives in Reno, Nevada with an historian and their daughter.

Donald Revell is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, six volumes of translations from the French, and three volumes of critical writings, including “Essay: A Critical Memoir.” A former fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations, he is the winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, and he has twice been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.