Open Door Series Online: Nathan Hoks & Tara Betts

Join us for a live virtual reading with Nathan Hoks and his student Jake Weiss, and Tara Betts and her student Ciara Miller. The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students.

Poetry Foundation’s events are completely free of charge and open to the public. A Zoom link will be provided to Eventbrite registrants the day of the event. This reading will include live captioning. If you require any other accessibility measures, please contact us by emailing events@poetryfoundation.org. To find out more about Zoom’s own built-in accessibility features, please visit https://zoom.us/accessibility.

Nathan Hoks has published two books of poetry, Reveilles and The Narrow Circle, which was a winner of the National Poetry Series. A chapbook, Moony Days of Being, won the 2017 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Hoks teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute, and is an editor and printer for Convulsive Editions, a Chicago-based micropress. His third book, Nests in Air, is forthcoming from Black Ocean.

Tara Betts is the author of Arc & Hue (Willow Books, 2009) and the chapbook THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali (Winged City Chapbook Press, 2013).

An undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Jake Weiss hails from New York, NY. He likes walking underneath the cold Williamsburg Bridge at night.

Ciara Darnise Miller holds both an MFA and MA in Poetry and African American/African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University where she founded the city’s popular Bloomington Poetry Slam Series. She also received her BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, a school known for its rigorous writing curriculum. She has published poems and academic essays in such collections and periodicals as Black Girl Magic, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, Break Beat Poets, Mosaic, Fjords Review, African American Review, Callaloo, Muzzle, Alice Walker: Critical Insights, Chorus, and many more.