Poetry Reading with Martha Collins, Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, and Nathan McClain (in person & via Zoom)

This reading will be presented in person as well as via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent at the time of registration and again the morning of the reading. Tickets are free, though donations toward the readers’ honoraria are greatly appreciated. Please write to ask@writerscenter.org with any questions.

Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry, Casualty Reports, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series in October 2022. Her tenth book, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous poetry books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2018 & 2014), and three works that focus on race and racism: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006).Blue Front, a book-length poem based on a lynching the poet’s father witnessed as a child, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library; both Blue Front and White Papers won Ohioana awards. Some of Collins’ other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. An active translator, Collins has also published four volumes of co-translations from the Vietnamese and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017). A fifth co-translated volume, Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tue Sy, with Nyugen Ba Chung, will be published by Milkweed in spring 2023. Born in Nebraska and raised in Iowa, Collins was educated at Stanford University and the University of Iowa. She founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and for ten years served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of two poetry collections: Ubasute, which won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition, and the full-length collection Common Grace, forthcoming from Beacon Press in Fall 2022. His honors include a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Daily, RHINO, upstreet, Verse Daily, DMQ Review, Poet Lore, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. His paintings have appeared in galleries throughout Connecticut, including Chester Gallery, the John Slade Ely House, Westport Arts Center, and City Lights Gallery in Bridgeport. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is also the author and illustrator of Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee).

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) and Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Zocalo Public Square, The Critical Flame, and On The Seawall, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as Poetry Editor for The Massachusetts Review.