Join us for an evening of poetry from Ilya Kaminsky, Katie Farris, Danielle Chapman, and Jesse Nathan to celebrate the publication of The occasion for the reading is to celebrate the publication of Jesse Nathan's Eggtooth and Danielle Chapman's Holler, each of them about fifteen years in the making.
Jesse Nathan’s poetry has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, The Believer, Zyzzyva, and the inaugural issue of Revel, among other magazines. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Stanford University, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley, Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, the Ashbery Home School, and the Kansas Arts Commission. He's a 2024 LABA Bay Area Fellow. His first book of poems, Eggtooth, was published by Unbound Edition Press in 2023. It was Peter Campion’s first acquisition for the press, and the collection includes a foreword by Robert Hass. Nathan was a founding editor of the McSweeney's Poetry Series. He contributes occasional prose to the the New York Times. With Ilya Kaminsky and Dominic Luxford, he edited In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting on Earth: Poems from Far and Wide. Nathan’s reviews and interviews appear in the online McSweeney's series “Short Conversations with Poets.” He teaches in the English Department at UC Berkeley.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa, Ukraine in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press) and co-editor and co-translated many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins), In the Hour of War: Poems from Ukraine (Arrowsmith), and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books). His work was the finalist for The National Book Award and won The Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The National Jewish Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, Lannan Fellowship, Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). Deaf Republic was The New York Times’ Notable Book, and was also named Best Book of the Year by dozens of other publications, including Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Irish Times, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Library Journal, and New Statesman. He collaborates frequently with painters, sculptors, musicians, choreographers, and theater artists. Odesa, Kaminsky’s recent collaboration with the photographer Yelena Yamchuk, published by Gost Books, was listed by Time Magazine among The 20 Best Photo Books of 2022. His poems have been translated into over twenty languages, and his books are published in many countries, including Turkey, Netherlands, Latvia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Russia, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain, Iceland, India, Slovenia, France (where Kaminsky received Prix Alain Bosquet given annually by Gallimard), Italy (where his work was honored by the Bonanni Prize in L’Aquila), Germany (where his poetry was listed by the SWR television channel as German literary critics’ top pick) and China (where he was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize). In 2019, Kaminsky was selected by BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.” Ilya Kaminsky has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center. More recently, he worked pro-bono as the Court Appointed Special Advocate for Orphaned Children in Southern California. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.
Danielle Chapman is a poet, nonfiction writer, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her memoir, Holler: A Poet Among Patriots (2023) and her second book of poems, Boxed Juice (forthcoming, 2024) are published by Unbound Edition Press. Her debut poetry collection, Delinquent Palaces, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2015. Chapman's poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and Poetry. Two chapters from Holler appeared originally in The Oxford American, and the opening essay will be part of the debut issue of Revel, a literary journal edited by Atsuro Riley and launching in Fall 2023. Chapman has written poetry criticism for The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, The Financial Times and The New York Times Book Review. Danielle was an editor at Poetry beginning in 2003, as well as a consulting editor to The Poetry Foundation. From 2007 through 2013 she served as the Director of Literary Arts and Events for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, where she created programs to serve Chicago’s writers, publishers, and literary community. Since 2013, Danielle has taught in the English Department at Yale. She currently teaches Shakespeare and the Craft of Writing Poetry, a hybrid literature/ creative writing course that pairs poetry from Shakespeare's plays with contemporary poems. Danielle lives in Hamden, CT, with her husband, Christian Wiman; their twin daughters, Eliza and Fiona; and their rescue dachshund, Rosie.
Katie Farris is the author of the memoir-in-poems, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive from Alice James Books (US) and Liverpool University Press (UK), which was listed as a Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. She is also the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls, (Marick Press, 2011; Tupelo Press 2019), and the chapbooks A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, winner of the 2021 Chad Walsh Poetry Award, Thirteen Intimacies (Fivehundred Places, 2017), and Mother Superior in Hell (Dancing Girl, 2019). Most recently she is winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and Poetry, and has been commissioned by MoMA. She is the co-translator of several books of poetry from the Ukrainian, French, Chinese, and Russian, most recently, The Country Where Everyone's Name is Fear, Translations of Lydmila and Boris Khersonsky. She graduated with an MFA from Brown University, and is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.
Books and refreshments will be available for purchase.