oin us in person (or on Zoom) as Erika Meitner (Useful Junk, BOA, 2022) and Victoria Redel (Paradise, 2022) read from their latest collections.
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Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children’s book Janna and the Kings, and a history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. She is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Patricia is a Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York and an instructor in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program.
Erika Meitner was born and raised in Queens and Long Island, New York. She attended Dartmouth College (for a BA in Creative Writing and Literature), Hebrew University on a Reynolds Scholarship, and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing as a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and her MA in Religious Studies as a Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies. In 2015, she was the US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, and in 2001-2 she was the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She has received additional fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Blue Mountain Center, Bethany Arts, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and APR. She also creates larger-scale documentary photo/text projects on urban environments, including “This is Not a Requiem for Detroit” and “RNC CLE” for Virginia Quarterly Review with Ryan Spencer Reed, and a project currently in progress on Miami and sea-level rise with Anna Maria Barry-Jester. Meitner is the author of five books of poems. Her first book, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, won the 2002 Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and was published in 2003 by Anhinga Press. Her second book, Ideal Cities, was selected by Paul Guest as a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series competition, and was published in 2010 by HarperCollins. Her third collection, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, was published by Anhinga Press in 2011. Her fourth collection of poems, Copia, was published by BOA Editions in 2014 as part of their American Poets Continuum Series, and her newest collection, Holy Moly Carry Me, was also published by BOA Editions in September 2018. Holy Moly Carry Me is the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. Her sixth book of poems, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Spring 2022. Meitner is a first-generation American: her father is from Haifa, Israel; her mother was born in a refugee camp in Stuttgart, Germany, which is where her maternal grandparents settled after surviving Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Mauthausen concentration camps. In addition to teaching creative writing at UVA, UW-Madison, and UC-Santa Cruz, she has worked as a dating columnist, an office temp, a Hebrew school instructor, a computer programmer, a systems consultant, a lifeguard, a documentary film production assistant, and a middle school teacher in the New York City public school system. As part of her commitment to student mentorship, she is also the creator and steward of the Post-MFA Resources Tumblr. Meitner is currently a Professor of English in the MFA program in Creative Writing and the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Virginia Tech.
Victoria Redel is the author of four books of poetry and five books of fiction. Her new novel, Before Everything, was published by Viking Penguin in June 2017 and was also published in the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Turkey and China. Her novel The Border of Truth (Counterpoint 2007) weaves the situation of refugees and a daughter’s awakening to the history and secrets of her father’s survival and loss. It was a Barnes and Noble Great New Writers Discovery Selection. Loverboy (2001, Graywolf /2002, Harcourt), was awarded the 2001 S. Mariella Gable Novel Award and the 2002 Forward Silver Literary Fiction Prize and was chosen in 2001 as a Los Angeles Times Best Book. Loverboy was adapted for a feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Swoon (2003, University of Chicago Press), was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated. Redel’s fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals including Granta.com. Harvard Review, The Quarterly, The Literarian, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, O the Oprah magazine, Elle, Bomb, More, and NOON. Redel is on the graduate and undergraduate faculty of Sarah Lawrence College. She has taught in the Graduate Writing Programs of Columbia University and Vermont College. Redel was the McGee Professor at Davidson College. She has received fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment For The Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Victoria Redel was born in New York. She is a first generation American of Belgian, Rumanian, Egyptian and Russian and Polish descent. She attended Dartmouth College (BA) and Columbia University (MFA).
