Toronto Poetry Reading April 14 with Nguyen, Benjamin, Lanthier, LoveGrove, Cassells, & Konchan
Spring is here - almost! Come celebrate with a literary reading.
Where: The Central, 603 Markham Street
When: April 14, 6:30-9This reading will feature: Hoa Nguyen, Tova Benjamin, Kateri Lanthier, Jennifer LoveGrove, Cyrus Cassells, and Virginia Konchan.
Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hoa Nguyen studied poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. She is the author of As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots (all from Wave Books). Nguyen teaches at Ryerson University’s Chang School, for Miami University’s low residency MFA program, in the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College, and in her own long-running, private poetics workshop.
Tova Benjamin is a poet, student and ex-chassidic Jew, strongly clinging to the hyphen in between those descriptors. She is obsessed with exegesis, hijacking rabbinical texts, and the spaces wittingly and unwittingly created during the exchange from one language to another. She is a writer for Rookie Magazine & her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Puerto Del Sol, and The Hairpin.
Kateri Lanthier holds a BA and MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada, the United States and England, including Grain, The Antigonish Review, London Magazine, EVENT, The Fiddlehead, Great Lakes Review, Green Mountains Review, Hazlitt, www.levelerpoetry.com, The Best of Walrus Poetry and Best Canadian Poetry 2014 (Tightrope Books). She is a Sessional Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her poem “The Coin Under the Leftmost Sliding Cup” won the 2013 Walrus Poetry Prize. Her second collection will be published in 2017 by Signal Editions, Véhicule Press.
Jennifer LoveGrove is the author of the Giller Prize longlisted novel Watch How We Walk, as well as two poetry collections: I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel and The Dagger Between Her Teeth. Her poetry was recently shortlisted for the 2015 Lit POP Awards, and she has work forthcoming in Taddle Creek and Rusty Toque. Her new collection of poetry Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes is forthcoming with BookThug in 2017. She divides her time between downtown Toronto and rural Ontario.
Cyrus Cassells is the author of five acclaimed books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, and The Crossed-Out Swastika. His sixth book, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, is forthcoming. Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches at Texas State University and lives in Austin, Texas.
Author of a poetry chapbook, Vox Populi (Finishing Line Press), and a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (forthcoming, Noctuary Press), Virginia Konchan’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Best New Poets, The Believer, and The New Republic. Co-founder of Matter, a journal of poetry and political commentary, she lives in Montreal.