Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series

Poetry & the Senses Flash Reading Series

Fall 2021

Weekly Releases

In spring 2021, ARC piloted a new Flash Reading Series featuring two dozen Bay Area community poets. We are thrilled to continue this series this fall, adding a dozen more Bay Area poets to our growing archive, with more to be added in spring. In addition to larger monthly readings (here) this series extends the number of voices we want to hear from, and carry with us, in these changing times. Each poet will give a 3-5 minute reading of one of their poems, related in some way to our new theme, coexistence.

Featured poets include: Katherine Agard, Caroline Goodwin, Amanda Gunn, Dana Koster, Randall Mann, Florencia Milito, Atsuro Riley, Kevin Simmonds, and more!

These short readings will carried on our website and YouTube channel, and shared on social media. ARC will release two per week from late October through the month of November. The word coexistence has a spatial component, and implies the sharing of space or cohabitation within overlapping territories; it also has a temporal dimension, suggesting simultaneous presence with others in the same moment in time. We are interested in work that engages capaciously with issues of mutuality, synchronicity, interdependence, and care – from enlivening exchanges between beings, to the porous line between animate and inanimate, to the challenges of living together on our planet, to the uncanny shivers of coincidence. 

Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series #29: Katherine Agyemaa Agard

Katherine Agyemaa Agard is a Trinidadian writer currently based in San Francisco. Her first book, of colour, was longlisted for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean LIterature and won the 2018 Essay Press Open Book award.

Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series #31: Caroline Goodwin

Caroline Goodwin’s forthcoming books are Matanuska (Aquifer Press, Wales, UK), Madrigals (Big Yes Press, San Luis Obispo, CA), and Old Snow, White Sun (JackLeg Press, Washington, D.C.). From 2014-2016 she served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, CA. Originally from Alaska, she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford and currently lives on the San Mateo Coast with her two daughters and Jimi Hendrix the Pug. 

Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series #27: Amanda Gunn

Amanda Gunn is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford as well as a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard where she works on Black poetics, Black pleasure, and ephemerality. Raised in Connecticut, she worked as a medical copyeditor for 13 years before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her work appears in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Lana Turner, and The Baffler. Her poem “Prayer” and Return” forthcoming in Narrative Magazine.

Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series #25: Dana Koster

Dana Koster has earned degrees from UC Berkeley and Cornell University. From 2011-2013, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her first collection, Binary Stars, was published by Carolina Wren Press in 2017. Dana’s poems have appeared in EPOCH, Indiana Review, Muzzle Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review and many others. She lives in Modesto, California with her husband and two children, where she works as a wedding photographer. For the past six years, Dana has also worked as one half of the art project Broad Sides with her collaborator, painter Chelsea America.

Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series #28: Randall Mann

Randall Mann is the author of five poetry collections, most recently A Better Life, which was published by Persea Books in April. His poems have appeared in the Adroit Journal, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco.

Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series #30: Florencia Milito

Florencia Milito is a bilingual poet, writer, and translator whose work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Indiana Review, Catamaran, Diálogo, 92nd Street Y, Quiet Lightning, Ninth Letter,Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA,Zócalo Public Square, womenvoicesforchange.org, and GUEST, among others. A Hedgebrook and Community of Writers alumna, and CantoMundo fellow, her writing has been influenced by her early experience fleeing Argentina’s 1976 coup, subsequent childhood in Venezuela, and immigration to the United States at the age of nine. Her bilingual collection Ituzaingó: Exiles and Reveries / exilios y ensueños was published in 2021 by Nomadic Press.

Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series #32: Atsuro Riley

Atsuro Riley is the author of Heard-Hoard (University of Chicago Press, 2021), winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Romey’s Order (University of Chicago Press, 2010), winner of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. His work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and the Wood Prize given by POETRY magazine.  Brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry, Riley lives in San Francisco. atsuroriley.org

Fall 2021 Flash Reading Series #26: Kevin Simmonds

Kevin Simmonds is a San Francisco-based writer and musician originally from New Orleans. His poetry collections include Bend to it and Mad for Meat (both from Salmon Poetry). He edited Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press) and Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof (University of South Carolina), the posthumously published collection by Carrie Allen McCray. His latest work is The Monster I am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse (Northwestern University), a hybrid collection of poetry and prose.

ARCs Flash Reading Series is part of our Poetry & the Senses initiative, generously funded by Engaging the Senses Foundation.

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