F241. Personal Best: A New Kind of Canon, Sponsored by Copper Canyon Press
Friday, February 9, 2024
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
Who chooses what poems will ultimately be remembered—editors, prize committees, the collective force of social media? This unique reading puts the decision with the artists themselves. Four award-winning poets consider their body of work and bring forward the poems they think matter most. Offering an intimate window onto intrinsic measures of success and failure, this reading—and the anthology that inspires it—upends notions of canon and curation by putting the poet front and center.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Participants
Erin Belieu is the author of numerous books, most recently Come-Hither Honeycomb, and her poems have appeared in places such as The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She currently teaches in the University of Houston’s MFA/PhD creative writing program, as well as for the Lesley University low-residency MFA in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Adrian Matejka is the author of seven books, most recently a mixed media collection inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books, 2021) and a collection of poems, Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), which was a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors’ Award. His first graphic novel, Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century, was published by Liveright in 2023. He lives in Chicago and is Editor of Poetry magazine.
Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Maybe-Bir (The Song Cave), and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. Jennifer teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop and the Institute of American Indian Arts. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, she lives in San Francisco.
Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. He’s the author of Guillotine, published by Graywolf Press, and Slow Lightning, which won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He's the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
Dana Levin is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Now Do You Know Where You Are (2022), a New York Times Notable Book. Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005, and in 2011 Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Banana Palace, published in 2016, was a finalist for the Rilke Prize. Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poetry. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Lannan, Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin currently serves as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis, where she lives.
