Readings by Katie Ford and Rae Armantrout

In her fourth collection, If You Have to Go (Graywolf Press), poet Katie Ford – “among the best poets of our generation” (Shane McCrae) – taps into the radical power of the sonnet form.

Joining Ford is Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout, who’ll read from her newest collection, Wobble (Wesleyan, 2018), among other work, with an onstage conversation between the poets and audience Q&A to follow.

Katie Ford is the author of three previous poetry collections: Blood Lyrics, Colosseum, and Deposition. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Reading Prize, she teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Rae Armantrout’s most recent books, Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, Itself, Partly: New and Selected Poems, and Entanglements (a chapbook selection of poems in conversation with physics), were published by Wesleyan University Press. In 2010 her book Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Armantrout was the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, Bomb, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, The New Anthology of American Poetry (Rutgers), The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine (Scribners), and several editions of the yearly anthology The Best American Poetry (Scribners). Wobble, a new volume of her poetry, is forthcoming from Wesleyan in September of 2018. She is recently retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics. While at UCSD she co-taught a course called Poetry for Physicists with physicist Brian Keating. She currently lives in the Seattle area.

All events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.