Our Emerging Poets Festival kicks off this Friday afternoon in the Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library. We’ve made it part of our mission to support strong new writers—and four of these talented comers (bios below) will gather for a panel discussion at 2:00 and a reading at 3:00. Both events are free and open to the public. There will be a break after the panel, so stop by whenever you can. Books will be available for sale and signing.
Collier Nogues’s first book, On the Other Side, Blue, was published by Four Way Books in 2011. She has received fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Oregon’s Fishtrap, Inc. She teaches writing at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in nearby Long Beach.
Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues, 2012) and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her awards include an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate University’s O’Connor Fellowship, The Gilman School’s Tickner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize. She lives in the Middle East, where she’s completing her second collection, tentatively titled The Explosive Expert’s Wife.
Nathaniel Perry is the author of Nine Acres (APR/Copper Canyon, 2011), which won the Honickman First Prize from The American Poetry Review. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Orion, Kenyon Review Online, Subtropics, and elsewhere. the editor of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, he lives with his family in rural southside Virginia.
Marcus Wicker’s first book, Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper, 2012), won the National Poetry Series Prize. The recipient of a 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, he has also held fellowships from Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center, and Indiana University. He is an assistant professor at Southern Indiana University.
