Lisa Olstein, Allison Cobb, Alicia Wright, and Estzer Takacs, Friday, November 17, 2017, 6pm
Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave.) is excited to host a reading by Lisa Olstein, Allison Cobb, Alicia Wright, and Eszter Takacs on Friday, November 17, 2017, at 6pm. The event is free and open to the public.
Allison Cobb is the author of After We All Died (Ahsahta Press); Green-Wood (Factory School); Plastic: an autobiography (Essay Press EP series); and Born2 (Chax Press). The poet Carolyn Forché calls After We All Died “inventive, visionary, hard-thought, and impossible to put down.” Cobb works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-curates The Switch reading, art, and performance series. Cobb’s work combines historical and scientific research, essay, and poetry to address issues of landscape, politics, and ecology. She was a 2015 finalist for the National Poetry Series; a 2015 Djerassi Resident Artist; a 2014 Playa Resident Artist; received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission; and was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow.
Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press 2006), winner of the Hayden Carruth Award; Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press 2009), a Library Journal best book of the year; Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press 2013), a Lannan Literary Selection; and Late Empire, from Copper Canyon in fall 2017. Her chapbook, The Resemblance of the Enzymes of Grasses to Those of Whales Is a Family Resemblance, won an Essay Press prize and was released in 2016. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Nation, American Letters & Commentary, and Boston Review. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Writing Residency, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Centrum. A member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, Olstein currently teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs. She is also the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite, fronted by acclaimed songwriter Jeffrey Foucault. Previously, she co-founded and for ten years directed the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she also served as associate director of the MFA program. She serves as an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly, a contributing editor for jubilat, and advisor for Bat City Review. Olstein earned a BA from Barnard College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, undertaking additional studies at the Aegean Center for Fine Arts and Harvard Divinity School.
Alicia Wright is originally from Rome, Georgia, and has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Ecotone, The Greensboro Review, Flag + Void, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, and Indiana Review, where she was the winner of the 2016 Poetry Prize, among others. At present, she is a doctoral candidate in creative writing at DU.
Eszter Takacs is the author of the chapbooks The Spectacular Crash and Together We Will Talk Right Down to Earth. Her poems have been published in Yalobusha Review, Salt Hill, Alice Blue, Soft Blow, Forklift Ohio, Coconut, Prelude, Sink Review, Diagram and elsewhere. She’s at work on a series of response poems to Sappho’s fragments and translates sporadically the work of Hungarian surrealist poet Lajos Kassak. She teaches and in her free time takes pictures of butterflies. She’s a first year creative writing PhD candidate at DU.