The Salon Series

Wednesday, January 25
4:30 PM | Greywood Lounge

Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois, native. He is the author of the book of poems Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016). He has also co-authored a book of poems and conversations called Prime (Sibling Rivalry Press). He is a Cave Canem graduate, received a scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and received a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Southern Indiana Review, Toe Good Poetry, West Branch, and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing from the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry and the 2015–17 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

Hayan Charara is a poet, children’s book author, essayist, and editor. His poetry books are Something Sinister (2016), The Sadness of Others (2006), and The Alchemist’s Diary (2001). His children’s book, The Three Lucys (2016), received the New Voices Award Honor, and he edited Inclined to Speak (2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. With Fady Joudah, he is also a series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. His honors include a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry from the University of Houston creative writing program, and the John Clare Prize. 

Thursday, February 23
4:30 PM | Greywood Lounge

TC Tolbert often identifies as a trans and genderqueer feminist, collaborator, dancer, and poet but really s/he’s just a human in love with humans doing human things. The author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press 2014) and 3 chapbooks, TC is also co-editor (along with Trace Peterson) of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books 2013). S/he is Core Faculty in the low residency MFA program at OSU-Cascades and spends his summers leading wilderness trips for Outward Bound. His favorite thing in the world is Compositional Improvisation (which is another way of saying being alive). www.tctolbert.com

Thursday, March 2
4:30 PM | Greywood Lounge

Robin Coste Lewis is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015), a National Book Award winner. She is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at the University of Southern California. Lewis is also a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from NYU, and an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University. A previous finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, she has published her work in various journals and anthologies, including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition: Women in Literary Arts, VIDA, Phantom Limb, and Lambda Literary Review, among others. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.

Thursday, March 9
4:30 PM | Winch/Capeheart

In collaboration with the Eddings Lecture Series, the Poetry Salon is thrilled to present Fred Moten. 

Fred Moten is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works), B. Jenkins (Duke University Press), The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions) and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia). His current projects include two critical texts, consent not to be a single being (forthcoming from Duke University Press) and Animechanical Flesh, which extend his study of black art and social life, and a new collection of poems, The Little Edges.

In 2009 Moten was Critic-in-Residence at In Transit 09: Resistance of the Object, The Performing Arts Festival at the House of World Cultures, Berlin and was also recognized as one of ten “New American Poets” by the Poetry Society of America; in 2011 he was a Visiting Scholar and Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Institute; in 2012, he was Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University and a member of the writing faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College; and in 2013 he was a Guest Faculty Member in the Summer Writers Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa Institute. He was also a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine from 2002 to 2004 and a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York from 2001 to 2002.

Moten served as a member of the Board of Managing Editors of American Quarterly and has been a member of the Editorial Collectives of Social Text and Callaloo, and of the Editorial Board of South Atlantic Quarterly. He is also co-founder and co-publisher (with Joseph Donahue) of a small literary press called Three Count Pour.

Thursday, November 10
4:30 PM | Greywood Lounge

Nathaniel Mackey is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Blue Fasa (New Directions, 2015); an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fifth volume, Late Arcade, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2017; and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews(University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).  Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company.  He is the editor of the literary magazineHambone and coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993).  His awards and honors include the National Book Award for poetry (2006), the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society (2008), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation (2014), and the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry (2015).  He is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University.

Tuesday, October 4
4:30 PM | Greywood Lounge

Dao Strom is a writer and musician whose work melds disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of a novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003), a collection of novellas, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006), and an image-text memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People (2015), accompanied by a music album,East/West (2015). She is a 2016 Creative Capital Award Artist. Her work has also received support from the Regional Arts Culture & Council, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, James Michener Fellowship, and the Nelson Algren Award. Strom is a contributing writer and editor to diacritics.org, the leading blog on Vietnamese diasporic arts and culture, and a co-curator of INHERITORS, a Portland-based hybrid forms literary series exploring the inheritance of violence. Stromwas born in Vietnam and grew up in northern California.