Amy Long is the author of Codependence, selected by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 Essay Collection Competition. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech and a master’s degree in women’s studies from the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She serves as a contributing editor at the drug history blog Points.

Conor Bracken is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in the Adroit Journal, At Length, Colorado Review, Diode, Indiana Review, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. His chapbook Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), was selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Recent translations include Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Findlay.

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine(1941–1995) was an Amazigh Moroccan poet and writer. In the 1960s, he established the Poésie Toute movement and co-founded the avant-garde journal Souffles. He authored many novels and collections of poetry, among them Agadir, Soleil Arachnide, Ce Maroc!, and Legende et vie d’Agoun’chich. Scorpionic Sun is the first book-length translation of his work into English.

Join us for an evening with award winning playwright, Carlos Murillo!

*This event is free & open to the public*

CARLOS MURILLO is a Chicago-based, internationally produced and award winning playwright of Colombian and Puerto Rican descent. He is a recipient of a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award for his work in the theatre.  He also received a 2016 Mellon Foundation Playwright Residency at Adventure Stage in Chicago. His body of work has been widely produced throughout the United States and Europe. His best known play Dark Play or Stories for Boys premiered at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and has been performed throughout the US, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Lithuania. The play appeared in the anthology New Playwrights: Best New Plays of 2007 (Smith & Kraus). His other work has been seen in New York at Repertorio Español, P73, the NYC Summer Playwrights Festival, En Garde Arts, The Public Theater New Work Now! Festival, and Soho Rep, in Chicago at The Goodman, Steppenwolf, Collaboraction, Walkabout Theatre, Adventure Stage and Theatre Seven, and in Los Angeles at Theatre @ Boston Court, Circle X and Son of Semele. His plays have been commissioned by Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Goodman, the Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Berkeley Rep, South Coast Rep, Steppenwolf and Adventure Stage and developed by The Sundance Theatre Lab, The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, New Dramatists and others.  The Javier Plays, a trilogy of works, published in spring of 2016 by 53rd State Press was called by American Theatre Magazine “an absolutely extraordinary achievement from a writer at the height of his powers.” Other publications include Mimesophobia (Broadway Play Publishing), A Human Interest Story (Dramatists Play Service) and his TYA play Augusta & Noble (Dramatic Publishing). Awards include the Met Life Nuestros Voces Award from Repertorio Español, the Frederick Loewe Award from New Dramatists, the Ofner Prize from the Goodman Theatre, the Otis Guernsey Award from the William Inge Theatre Festival, a Distinguished Play Award from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, a Jerome Fellowship at The Playwrights’ Center and two National Latino Playwriting Awards from Arizona Theatre Company. He has served on numerous selection panels, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital MAP Fund, New Dramatists, The Playwrights’ Center, the William Inge Theatre Festival, the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, and the Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. From 1993 to 1995, Carlos served as the Associate Literary Manager at The Public Theater in New York. Carlos heads the BFA Playwriting Program at The Theatre School of DePaul University, and is a proud alumnus of New Dramatists. He serves on the board of directors of the MacDowell Colony. Carlos lives in the south side of Chicago with his wife, the director, Lisa Portes, and their two children Eva and Carlitos.

As part of International Education Week, this year when Kent State commemorates the 50th anniversary of May 4, 1970, the Wick Poetry Center invites community members to contribute their voices to a Global Peace Poem. The Global Peace Poem builds meaningful opportunities for connection and reflections across divisions. Wick Teaching Artists will guide writers in a conversation and writing activity. The resulting lines will be a way to honor and respond to the events of May 4.

Following the workshop, there will be an Open Mic. All are welcome to read or listen.

Paola Capó-García is the author of Clap for Me That’s Not Me, selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of Rescue Press’s 2017 Black Box Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Volta, Latino Book Review, jubilat, Poetry Society of America, Academy of American Poets, and others. She is the co-founder/editor of the literary/arts journal littletell, alongside Maria Flaccavento. Originally from San Juan, PR, she now lives in San Diego, CA, where she teaches twelfth-grade English.

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Advantages of Being Evergreen, winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 Open Book Poetry Competition, and of The Spectral Wilderness, selected by Mark Doty for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbook The Gospel According to X. He is an assistant professor of poetry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. She spent three years in Eugene, earning an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, and is currently back east working towards a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on contemporary poetry about the Holocaust, with a special focus on atrocity in former Soviet territories. Julia is the author of “The Many Names for Mother,” selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize, forthcoming from Kent State University Press in fall of 2019, and “The Bear Who Ate the Stars” (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and Best New Poets 2018, among others. Julia edits Construction Magazine  and when not busy chasing her 3-year-old around the playgrounds of Philadelphia, Julia writes “Other Women Don’t Tell You,” a blog about motherhood.

Ellen Bass is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book, “Like a Beggar” (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, The Publishers Triangle Award, The Milt Kessler Poetry Award, The Lambda Literary Award and the Northern California Book Award. Previous books include “The Human Line” (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) and “Mules of Love” (BOA Editions, 2002) which won The Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the first major anthology of women’s poetry, “No More Masks!” (Doubleday, 1973). Her non-fiction books include “Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth” (HarperCollins, 1996), “I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse” (HarperCollins, 1983) and “The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse” (Harper Collins, 1988, 2008), which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages. Ellen founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, CA jails. She currently teaches in the low residency MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and serves on the editorial team at Fence. His work has been recognized most recently with a New Works Grant from the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Holloway Visiting Professorship in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. Matuk is currently working on a collaboration with visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez that is forthcoming from Singing Saw Press.

Anne Lesley Selcer is the author of Sun Cycle, selected by CA Conrad as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 First Book Poetry Competition, as well as the essay collection Blank Sign Book and from A Book of Poems on Beauty, winner of the Gazing Grain Press Award. Her writing on art includes Banlieusard, a book-length text for Artspeak, as well as essays for museum and gallery catalogs and art magazines. Writing occasionally manifests as moving image or sound.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of a New York Times best-selling biography on A Tribe Called Quest called Go Ahead in the Rain (University of Texas Press, February 2019), The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. Abdurraqib has two forthcoming books including a new collection of poems A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019) and a history of Black performance in the United States titled They Don’t Dance No Mo’ (Random House, 2020).

Henk Rossouw’s book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. The African Poetry Book Fund included his chapbook The Water Archives in their boxset New-Generation African Poets: Tano. Poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. An assistant professor, Henk teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is from South Africa.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of The Fluency of Light (2013) and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (2017). Her most recent book of essays was nominated for the University of Iowa’s Essay Prize and won the CLMP Firecracker Award for nonfiction. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan.