A reading by two important contemporary poets:
A native of San Francisco, California, Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently Art in Time (Nightboat Books, 2021), which comprises twenty poetic essays on innovative landscape art, and On Walking On (Nightboat Books, 2017), a collection of poems that explores the relationship between writing and walking. She has also written two volumes of critical essays, And And And (Free Poetry, Boise State University, 2022) and Noise That Stays Noise (University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series, 2011). She co-edited, with David Saint-John, the Norton anthology American Hybrid, and she has collaborated with visual artists on artists’ books, including a collection on the history of electricity with Karen Randall (Zap, Propolis Press, 2017), and Flare (Yale University Art Gallery, 2009) with the painter Thomas Nozkowski.
Michael D. Snediker is the author of Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain & Queer Embodiment (U.Minnesota Press, 2021) & Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions (U.Minnesota Press, 2009). He is also the author of two books of poems, The New York Editions (Fordham University Press, 2017) & The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum Books, 2014). His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including differences, ELH, The Henry James Review, Qui Parle, as well as edited collections with Cambridge University Press, Duke University Press, and Oxford University Press. He is presently writing about object relations minus objects in the work of Lauren Berlant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and the Proustian scenics of Thoreau’s journals. A fortunate recipient of residencies at both the James Merrill House & Yaddo, he is presently Professor of American Literature & Poetics at the University of Houston.
This reading–free and open to the public–will take place on the Wake Forest University campus at 5 pm in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library auditorium (room 404).