SHP Presents: An Evening with Liz Ahl, Spree MacDonald, Lillo Way, and Jianqing Zheng (via Zoom)

Please join us on Zoom for the launch of the SHP fall reading series! We are thrilled to welcome four Slapering Hol Press contest winners as they read from their latest collections. This reading will take place via Zoom. The Zoom link will be emailed after registration. (Please check spam / promotions folder for this email and email admin@writerscenter.org with any questions.) Donations toward the readers’ honoraria are much appreciated.

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), Home Economics(Seven Kitchens Press, 2016), Talking About the Weather (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012), Luck (Pecan Grove Press, 2010), and A Thirst That’s Partly Mine (winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest). Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, among them Prairie Schooner, Sinister Wisdom, Measure, Nimrod, and Crab Orchard Review. Her work has also been included in several anthologies, including This Assignment is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013), COVID Spring: Granite State Pandemic Poems (Hobblebush Books, 2020), Show Us Your Papers (Main Street Rag, 2020), Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press, 2018) and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017), among others. She has been awarded residencies at Playa, Jentel, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. She teaches writing at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

Spree MacDonald will read from his debut full-length collection, Konkababy which Ghirmai Negash, Professor of English & Postcolonial Literatures, calls “Deftly written, haunting, and enchanting.” Spree lives with his family in Albuquerque where he is a high school principal. Among other past lives, he has been a university instructor, drywaller, building painter, high school teacher, marina worker, tutor, fruit packer, grocery stocker, snow shoveler, cherry picker, and a teacher trainer in rural South Africa. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, Milksop Codicil (Slapering Hol Press), which won the SHP chapbook contest.

Lillo Way’s chapbook, Dubious Moon, won the Slapering Hol Chapbook Contest. Her poem “Offering,” is the winner of the E.E. Cummings Award for New England Poetry Club, a poets’ association founded in 1915 by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, and Conrad Aiken. Her poem “Appropriation,” winner of a Florida Review Editors’ Award for Poetry. She is numerous times a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in RHINO, Poet Lore, Tampa Review, New Letters, Louisville Review, New Orleans Review, Tar River Poetry, Madison Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Poetry East, The American Journal of Poetry, among others. Twelve of Way’s poems are included in anthologies. Way has received grants from the National Endowment the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for her choreographic work involving poetry. Way served on the faculty of the Dance Program of the School of Education at New York University for five years, one of which years, she was Assistant Professor and Artist-in-Residence. She taught at Hunter College for four years, and was a guest artist/instructor at Princeton University. She also taught at the University of Maryland and Barnard College, and presented lectures and workshops at other colleges and universities throughout the country. She was a regular reader on NPR’s “Selected Shorts”, recorded live at Symphony Space in New York City.

Jianqing Zheng edits Poetry South, Valley Voices, and Journal of Ethnic American Literature. He is author of two poetry chapbooks, The Landscape of Mind (Slapering Hol Press) and Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Texas Review Press), recipient of two artist fellowships from Mississippi Arts Commission and the Fulbright Scholarship, and professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University. He earned a PhD in English from The University of Southern Mississippi. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Louisiana Literature, Mississippi Review, Poetry East, and Roanoke Review.