Sandra Beasley is author of three poetry collections: Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA Literature Fellowship, the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, and two DCCAH Artist Fellowships. She is also the author of the memoir Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at the University of Tampa.
Leslie Harrison is the author of Displacement, published by Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in 2009. She holds graduate degrees from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, FIELD, Subtropics, Pleiades, and Orion. Harrison has held a scholarship and fellowship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2011 she was awarded a fellowship in literature from The National Endowment for the Arts. She was the 2010 Philip Roth resident in poetry at Bucknell University, and then a visiting assistant professor in poetry and creative nonfiction at Washington College. In the fall of 2012 she joined the full-time faculty at Towson University. In 2014 The Maryland State Arts Council awarded her an Individual Artist Award in poetry.
Read "Grief Puppet" and "Parable" by Sandra Beasley.
Read "[That]" and "Autobiography--As a Vase" by Leslie Harrison.
Recorded On: Wednesday, January 20, 2016