An Afternoon with Suzanne Frischkorn, Mai Der Vang, & Jennifer Elise Forester

Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Fixed Star forthcoming from JackLeg Press, (September 2022) as well as the books, Girl on a Bridge, and Lit Windowpane (both from Main Street Rag Press), and the chapbooks American Flamingo, Spring Tide, Red Paper Flower, Exhale, and The Tactile Sense. She is the recipient of The Writer’s Center Emerging Writers Fellowship for her book Lit Windowpane, the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Indiana Review, The Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Verse Daily, Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems, part of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet Series (Knopf), Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity University Press, 2020), NPR’s Poetry Moment podcast, and elsewhere.
She is an Editor at $ – Poetry Is Currency and serves on the Terrain.org Editorial Board.

Mai Der Vang is the author of two collections of poetry. Her first book, Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), received the First Book Award of the Academy of American Poets, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second collection, Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the LA Times Book Prize in Poetry, and is currently a finalist for the California Book Awards. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Writer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, the American Poetry Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, espnW, and elsewhere. Mai Der also co-edited How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology with the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. A Kundiman fellow, Mai Der has completed residencies at Civitella Ranieri and Hedgebrook. Born and raised in Fresno, California, she earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of  The Maybe-Bird (Song Cave, 2022), Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press. She received her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship (2017), a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship (2014), and was a Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry at Breadloaf (2017) and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford (2008-2010). She has also received fellowships to attend Soul Mountain Retreat, Caldera Arts, the Naropa Summer Writing Program, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Mesa Refuge. Jennifer teaches in the IAIA Low Residency MFA Creative Writing Program and at The Rainier Writing Workshop. Foerster is of German, Dutch, and Mvskoke descent, is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. Jennifer grew up living internationally and now lives in San Francisco.