AWP Offsite Event: McSweeney’s Poetry Series Reading
Join us for an evening of stunning, strange, wildly diverse contemporary poetry! The McSweeney’s Poetry Series and the Richard Hugo House present Victoria Chang, Dan Chelotti, Zubair Ahmed, and Carl Adamshick. The event will be MCed by McSweeney’s Poetry Series editors Dominic Luxford and Jesse Nathan.
Victoria Chang’s two previous collection of poetry are Salvinia Molesta, published by the University of Georgia Press as part of the VQR Poetry Series in 2008, and Circle, published by the Southern Illinois University Press as the winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition. Her poems appear in the Believer, POETRY, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, New England Review, Colorado Review, Smartish Pace, Blackbird, and elsewhere. Chang holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Harvard, and Stanford, as well as an MFA from Warren Wilson. She works as a business writer and communications specialist and lives in Southern California with her family.
Dan Chelotti is the author of a chapbook, The Eights (Poetry Society of America, 2006), which was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the PSA’s National Chapbook Fellowship. His poems and reviews have appeared in Fence, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, and many other magazines, and they’ve been anthologized in State of the Union (Wave, 2008) and in Free Verse’s “New Voices from New England Supplement.” He has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has worked as an Assistant Managing Editor for Verse Press.
Zubair Ahmed was born in 1988 and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In 2005 his family won the Diversity Visa Lottery, which granted them the opportunity to immigrate to the United States. During the year-and-a-half before moving, Ahmed dropped out of school and became a professional video gamer. Ahmed now studies mechanical engineer- ing and creative writing at Stanford University.
Carl Adamshick’s first collection, Curses and Wishes: Poems, won the Walt Whitman Award in 2010, and was published by Louisiana State University the following year. His book was selected by Marvin Bell. Adamshick’s poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Harvard Review, the Missouri Review, Narrative, theOregonian, and elsewhere. He’s received an Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts and is a cofounder of Tavern Books (Portland, Ore.), which he runs with former Stegner Fellow Michael McGriff. Adamshick was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1969 but grew up in Harvard, Illinois. He lives now in Portland, Oregon.
