Wednesday, September 16, 2015

The Darkness in the Body that Redeems: A Reading of Poetry

by
Kevin Shelton
 
What better way to greet an old friend than with a welcome back party. Get ready as Laura Madeline Wiseman, Sarah Henning, Cat Dixon, Amy Ash, and Callista Buchen come together to read at the 2015 Steel Pen Welcome Back Event. This will be the second annual conference Indiana Writers’ Consortium is hosting. The off-site event will be on October 9 starting at 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. and will be taking place at Purdue University Calumet in the Center for Innovation through Visualization and Simulation (CIVS). This won’t be a simulation, though, as these exhilarating authors spill forth words into a seamless stream of poetry that will take you on a ride through darkness in the body and how pain can restructure and redeem a woman. Below is what each author is bringing:
 
Laura Madeline Wiseman has a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska- Lincoln in English and a M.A. from the University of Arizona in women’s studies. She is the author of several books that include Drink (BlazeVOX, 2015), Wake (Aldrich Press, 2015), and The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2015). She is also the editor of the anthology Women Write Resistance (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). The poems she will be reading from Drink “explore the unmaking of a girl’s body via the pain of spatial destruction.”  
 
Sara Henning is the author of A Sweeter Water (Lavender Ink, 2013), Garden Effigies (Dancing Girl Press, 2015), and To Speak to Dahlias (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Sara Henning has also appeared in Women Write Resistance with her poem “The Art of Exes.”
 
Cat Dixon’s full length poetry book Too Heavy to Carry was published in 2014 by Stephen F. Austin University Press. She also has a chapbook called Our End has Brought the Spring (Finishing Line Press, 2015).  Dixon teaches creative writing at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. She will be reading from Too Heavy to Carry and wants “to give hope to others who may be caught in a web of lies and pain” through her poetry.
 
Amy Ash has a Ph.D from the University of Kansas. She is the author of The Open Mouth of the Vase that won the 2013 Cider Press Review Book Award.  Her individual work can be found in Mid-American Review, Harpur Palate, Cimarron Review, and others. Amy Ash and Callista Buchen will be reading from their collaborative chapbook Echo, Unravel.
 
Callista Buchen is the author of The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, October 2015) and Double-Mouthed (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming winter 2016). She is the winner of DIAGRAM’s essay contest for her prose piece “Belly Sea.”  Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Whiskey Island Review, and others.
 
Come on by the CIVS room in the Powers building room 123 as the event will start at 5:30 p.m. and end at 7:30 p.m. with a five minute Q&A after each reader. After everyone has read, there will be time left for a book signing. You won’t want to miss these poets reading as “there are few things finer than attending a reading, to spend an hour or more in a room filled with the sounds of words” as Wiseman perfectly describes it, and I can’t agree more.
 
For more information on the 2015 Steel Pen Conference, please visit: http://www.indianawritersconsortium.org/IWC-creative-writing-conference.asp

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