T156.
Future Forward: Celebrating New Debuts during Copper Canyon’s 50th Anniversary
Thursday, March 9, 2023
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
A lively and provocative literary present shapes our possible futures. For its 50th anniversary, Copper Canyon Press looks to its newest debut authors, who represent the many edges of poetry’s future. Ancient Chinese idioms transcend time in an immigrant’s poems of desire and grief. A librarian-artist perfects play in diverse self-expressions. A former medical editor explores the body in illness and pleasure. And a policy advisor aches with forbidden love while living in a surveillance state.
Participants
Ryo Yamaguchi is the publicist at Copper Canyon Press. He is the author of The Refusal of Suitors (Noemi Press), and has been a book critic for Harriet Books at the Poetry Foundation and Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. His poems have appeared widely, including The Best American Poetry 2020.
Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and writes both in English and Chinese. He is the author of the poetry collection, Burying the Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2021).
Amanda Gunn is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard where she works on Black pleasure and ephemerality. Her poems, whose subjects include women's labors, mental illness, addiction, and desire and the fat body, appear in Poetry, Poetry NW, and The Baffler. She is currently a Stegner Fellow.
