Poetry Jam

Date And Time
Tue, September 8, 2020

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT

About this Event
Poets on schedule:

Stephen Kuusisto, author of Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.

Maria R. Palacios is a Latina, feminist writer, author, professional workshop facilitator, and empowerment specialist. Her work surrounding disabilities and sexuality embraces diversity, self-acceptance and poetic activism. Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility, includes the following pieces by Palacios: Maria Full of Sin (2008), Testimony (2009), Hunger (2009), My Sexy Disability (2010) and Vagina Manifesto (2009).Maria is known in the artistic world as the Goddess on Wheels.

Laurie Clements Lambeth grew up in California. where at 17, she received a diagnosis of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. She began to write poetry that investigates the individual body’s contour in context with the external world. An avid horsewoman, she rode and trained horses competitively for many years. She holds a BA from Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, and an MFA and PhD from the University of Houston’s creative writing program. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, Crazyhorse, Mid-American Review, Seneca Review, Indiana Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Mid-American Review, where her essay was named Editor’s Choice in their nonfiction competition, in The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

Kenny Fries, the author of In the Province of the Gods (Creative Capital Literature Award), The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights), and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia. His work has appeared widely in places such as The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, and LitHub. Twice a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), he was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan/US Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, and received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, as well as grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College.