Mentors & Mentees: Alessandra Lynch & Douglas Manuel with Deborah Woodard & Eli Briskin

Mentors and mentees share the stage for this reading featuring poets Alessandra Lynch and Douglas Manuel, who’ll both read from their newly published collections.

Lynch’s third full-length collection, published by Alice James Books, is entitled Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment. “With a music prowess both deft and ferocious, these empathetic poems…woe and terrify simultaneously. Terrible things happen in this book and it’s wonderful—such is the redemptive power of poetry this exquisite.” –Dean Young

Douglas Manuel uses hip-hop, blues, and jazz to form a bildungsroman on growing up black in the crack-laden Midwest of the 1980s in his debut collection, Testify (Red Hen Press). “Each powerful testimony in this collection stands as evidence of an eloquent and dramatic new voice in American poetry.” –David St. John

Also featuring readings by mentor/mentee pair Deborah Woodard and Eli Briskin.

Alessandra Lynch is the author of Sails the Wind Left Behind, It was a terrible cloud at twilight, and Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony of the Arts and Yaddo. Alessandra was born on the East River in New York City and now lives in Indianapolis with her husband and sons by a stony creek, two hackberry bushes, and a magnolia trio. She teaches in Butler University’s undergraduate and MFA programs.

Deborah Woodard is the author of Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star Press) and Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats). She has translated the poetry of Amelia Rosselli from the Italian: The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems, 1953-1981 (Chelsea Editions) and Hospital Series (New Directions). She regularly teaches at Hugo House.

Douglas Manuel received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and a MFA from Butler University where he was the Managing Editor of Booth a Journal. He is currently a Middleton and Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California where he is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Superstition Review, Rhino, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, New Orleans Review, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere. His first full-length collection of poems, Testify, was released by Red Hen Press in the spring of 2017.

E. Briskin lives in Seattle. E’s poems appear online at Pacifica Literary Review and The Alice.