“Shape of the ‘I'” Conference Reading, Saturday, April 14, 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Saturday, April 14, 2012, from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., Counterpath hosted a reading as part of “Shape of the ‘I’: A National Conference,” a two-day series of events at the University of Colorado, Boulder, including panel discussions, readings, screenings, and performances focused on questions of the subject through such diverse lenses as medicine, law, literature, poetics, creative non-fiction, feminism, queer studies, performance studies, and more. For more information on the conference, click here.
With readings at Counterpath by: Francisco Aragon; Marcia Douglas; Andy Fitch; Noah Eli Gordon; Robin Hemley; Bhanu Kapil; Karla Kelsey; Petra Kuppers; Danielle Pafunda; Lia Purpura; Margaret Ronda; Mathias Svalina; Brian Teare
Scroll down for bios and videos of many of the readings.
Marcia Douglas was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. She is the author of the novels, Madam Fate (Soho, 1999) and Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells (Peepal Tree Press, 2005) as well as a collection of poetry, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom (Peepal Tree Press, 1999), which received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the U.K. Her work has appeared in anthologies and journals internationally. Marcia is an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder
Andy Fitch is an assistant professor at The University of Wyoming. Ugly Duckling Presse has recently published his creative nonfiction volume Ten Walks/2 Talks. His expanded 60 Morning Walks book is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. He also has a book of 60 interviews forthcoming from Ugly Duckling, and a critical study, entitled Not Smart. But Intelligent: Rethinking Joe Brainard forthcoming from Dalkey Archive.
Robin Hemley is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently A Field Guide For Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and Reply All, a collection of short stories (Break Away Books, Indiana University Press, 2012), and the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and many other awards. His prose has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The Believer, New York Magazine, Orion, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Sun, and many others. He is the Founder and chief organizer of the NonfictioNOW Conference and has served as the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa.
Bhanu Kapil has written four full-length cross-genre works, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011). She teaches at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Karla Kelsey is the author of Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, which was selected by Carolyn Forche for the 2005 Sawtooth Poetry Prize (Ahsahta Press, 2006). Her second full-length book, Iteration Nets, has just been released from Ahsahta Press. She teaches at Susquehannah University.
Lia Purpura is the author of seven collections of essays, poems and translations, including On Looking, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. Her awards include NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, and four Pushcart prizes, and her recent work can be read in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, Field, and The Paris Review. She is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola University, Baltimore, MD and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, WA. Rough Likeness (essays, Sarabande Books) was just released, in January 2012.
Margaret Ronda specializes in American poetry of the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. Particular areas of interest include Marxist criticism, aesthetic and genre theory, ecological literary modes (especially georgic and pastoral), and avant-garde poetics. Her book of poems, Personification, was selected as the 2009 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize winner, and was published in April 2010. In the fall of 2012 she will be joining the faculty in the department of English at Rutgers University.
Mathias Svalina is the author of Destruction Myth (Cleveland State Poetry Center), I am a Very Productive Entrepreneurer (Mudluscious), and a forthcoming book, The Explosions (Subito Press). He is also the co-publisher of Octopus Books. Mathias lives and teaches in Denver, Colorado.
Brian Teare is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. He has published poetry and criticism widely and is the author of three full-length books, The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map (University of California Press), and Pleasure (Ahsahta Press). His fourth book, Companion Grasses, will be out from Omnidawn in the spring of 2013. After a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s now an Assistant Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Francisco Aragon, native of San Francisco, is the author of Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press) and Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press), as well as the editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press). He is the director of Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame. He is also the editor of Canto Cosas, a book series out of Bilingual Press that publishes Latino poetry.
Noah Eli Gordon is the author of several books, including The Source (Futurepoem, 2011), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007). Gordon is the co-publisher of Letter Machine Editions, and an assistant professor in the MFA program in Creative Writing at The University of Colorado, Boulder.
Petra Kuppers is a professor at the University of Michigan and holds joint appointments in the departments of Art and Design; English; Theatre, Music, and Dance; and Women Studies. She is the author of Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (Palgrave, August 2011); The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Community Performance: An Introduction (Routledge, 2007); Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003) and several other books on disability, poetics, and performance.
Danielle Pafunda‘s books include the soon to be released Manhater (Dusie Press Books 2012), Iatrogenic (Noemi Press), My Zorba (Bloof Books), and the forthcoming Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books 2013). She is an assistant professor of English and gender & women’s studies at the University of Wyoming.