An Evening with Erika Meitner, Blas Falconer, & Nicole Cooley

Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), Copia (BOA Editions, 2014), and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs.

Blas Falconer is the author of three poetry collections, Forgive the Body This Failure, The Foundling Wheel, A Question of Gravity and Light, and a coeditor of two essay collections, The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. He has received numerous awards and his poems have appeared in various literary journals. He is the poetry editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches in the low-residency MFA at Murray State University and lives in Los Angeles.

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans. She has published six collections of poems, including, most recently, Girl after Girl, Breach and Milk Dress, as well as a novel, a chapbook and a collaborative artist’s book. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in The North American Review, Narrative, The Rumpus, The Atlantic, and The Feminist Wire among other venues. She is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-City University of New York and lives outside of NYC with her family.