with Anders Carlson-Wee, Adrian Matejka, and Brian Teare

Saturday, October 14, 2023
Fine Arts Stage, 2:00-2:45pm
*This event is ASL interpreted!

Join us as a trio of award-winning poets from across the nation converge on the Twin Cities:

Anders Carlson-Wee, a scion of Minnesota, returns to his home state to read from Disease of Kings, a new collection that focuses on friendship and loneliness amid the precarity of life in late capitalism—often with the American Midwest as a backdrop. 

“He manages a virtuoso’s dance through the book’s many astonishments, making elegance feel easy, which it is not. Expect acclaim.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

Adrian Matejka, currently taking the literary journal Poetry to new heights, is taking his astonishing verse to new places as well, as can be seen in his volley of new releases since 2020: a mixed-media Funkadelic-inspired chapbook; a virtuosic meditation on love and its aftermaths, Somebody Else Sold the World; and the graphic novel Last on His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century.

“Matejka’s muscular and mellifluous soundtrack is a savvy directive that reminds us that even chaos has a rhythm you can dance to.”

—Patricia Smith

Brian Teare, renowned among fellow poets and award-giving institutions for his exquisite painterly application of words and his ever-deepening exploration of queer abstraction and chronic illness, unveils his seventh full-length collection, Poem Bitten By A Man, in whicha notebook practice begets an ekphrastic paean to the power of creative process.

“I’m always moved (and changed) by Brian Teare.”

—Eileen Myles

We guarantee this poetry reading will take listeners into the back alleys of the world and the depths of the self alike. Not to be missed!

---

About the Authors

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of The Low Passions, a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite, winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other publications. Raised by Lutheran pastor parents in Moorhead, MN and currently living in other parts Midwest, Anders Carlson-Wee is a winner of the Poetry International Prize and a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers, Bread Loaf, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, among others.

Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Recent volumes include Map to the Stars (Penguin in 2017), a Funkadelic-inspired mixed media chapbook Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books, 2021), and Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), a finalist for the UNT 2022 Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. His graphic novel Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century, with art by Youssef Daoudi, was published in February 2023 by Liveright. Matejka served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19, and currently lives in Chicago; in 2022 he was selected to become Editor of the venerable Poetry magazine.

2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and six critically acclaimed books, including Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His most recent publications are a pair of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man. He’s currently an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. An editorial board member of Poetry Daily, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.