Amy King & Camille Rankine

Amy King and Camille Rankine will read from their most recent collection and discuss what they think it means to be a woman poet in our time. Amy King “applies pressure to the boundaries of “queer” poetry, while finding inspiration in pop culture, science, social taxonomies, and other questions of gender, ontology, and culture.” King will read from her new collection, The Missing Museum, a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. John Ashbery described her poems in I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press 2011) as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” She was honored by the Feminist Press as one of the “40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism” awardees. King serves on the executive board of VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts and moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO). Camille Rankine’s Slow Dance with Trip Wire (2011) was chosen byCornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s New York Chapbook Fellowship. Her first book of poetry, Merciful Impulses, was published by Copper Canyon in December 2015. Rankine’s honors include a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an honorary Cave Canem Fellowship.