Abigail Chabitnoy is a poet of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent and a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. She received her MFA at Colorado State University, where she was an associate editor for the Colorado Review. Her first full length book of poetry, How to Dress a Fish was published in February of 2019 by Wesleyan University Press.
Abigail Chabitnoy reads from How to Dress a Fish, which addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy.
Joy Katz, a poet and writer, studied at Ohio State, Washington University in St. Louis, and Stanford. Katz worked as a graphic designer before beginning to write poems. She teaches in Carlow University’s ongoing Madwomen in the Attic workshops for women and serves as a thesis advisor in Chatham University’s MFA program. She is also an editor-at-large for Copper Nickel. In 2015, Katz co-founded the activist art collective Ifyoureallyloveme with theater director and humanitarian activist Cynthia Croot. Artists in the group use word, music, and performance, combined with pro-beauty and anti-racist strategies, to make art in Pittsburgh and other cities. Katz participated in choosing the winners of the Ragan Poetry Contest at Saint Vincent College in 2011.
Joy Katz interacts with her audience and gives powerful insight into her writing style, then answers questions from the audience while she reads from her book The Garden Room as well as from multiple poems.
Information gathered from Joy Katz’s website
Khet Mar, a native of Burma, was born in 1969. She is a journalist, novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Author of one novel, Wild Snowy Night, as well as several collections of short stories, essays and poems, her work has been translated into English and Japanese, been broadcast on radio and made into a film. In the fall of 2007, Mar was a visiting fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and she is currently in residence at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, which provides sanctuary to writers exiled under threat of death, imprisonment or persecution in their native countries (Pen World Voices).
Translation students and Khet Mar read Mar's poetry (in which Mar, besides implementing various unique techniques, combines urban and rural themes that often never coincide in Burma).
A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Sarah O’Brien grew up on a small farm in Ohio and has lived in Cape Town, Paris and various places in the United States. She is the translator of Ryoko Sekiguchi’s Heliotropes, and her book Catch Light was selected by David Shapiro for the National Poetry Series. But not only is she a writer, she is also a fabulous cook and photographer.
O'Brien reads poems from Catch Light. With her visual narrative, O’Brien throws her audience into pictures, catching their eyes and ears and allowing them to become part of her story.
José Kozer is the preeminent Cuban poet of his generation and one of the most influential poets in Latin America, where his name is a household word among readers of poetry. He has published 51 books of poetry and two books of prose, and his work has been published in Mexico, Spain, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Chile. Dozens of articles and several books have been written about his work. He has been translated into English, German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, Italian and French. Kozer was the first living Cuban Diaspora poet to have a book published in Cuba.
Kozer reads and discusses multiple of his poems, elaborating on the imagery and memories gravitating around them.