We’re celebrating 40 years of New England Review with readings by Poetry Editor Rick Barot and recent NER contributors Gabrielle Bates, Keetje Kuipers, Eric McMillan, Susan Rich, Martha Silano, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Join us at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, on October 20, 7 pm. Open Books is located at 2414 North 45th Street in Seattle, WA.
Rick Barot, poetry editor of NER, has published three volumes of poetry: The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord (2015), all published by Sarabande Books. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2020. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.
Gabrielle Bates works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and helps edit the Seattle Review, Poetry Northwest, Broadsided Press, and Bull City Press. Her poems and poetry comics appear in the New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, and Gulf Coast, and she is the recipient of support from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Hugo House, and Artist Trust. She is originally from Birmingham, Alabama.
Keetje Kuipers has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Her work is published widely, and her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She is the author of the poetry collections Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010), The Keys to the Jail (BOA, 2014), and All Its Charms(forthcoming BOA, 2019). Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest and on faculty at Hugo House, Keetje lives with her family on an island in the Puget Sound where she is at work on a novel and a memoir.
Eric McMillan served ten years as an Army officer, participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and later returned in command of an infantry company during the “Surge” of 2007–2008. He has received support from the Richard Hugo House and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and his story “Havoc” appeared in NER 38.3. His fiction has also appeared in Gulf Coast and Witness. He lives in Seattle with his wife and son.
Susan Rich is the author of five books, most recently, Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press). She is the winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement Award, London. Her poems have been published in all 50 states including in such journals as the Antioch Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and Poetry Ireland. Along with Kelli Russell Agodon, she is cofounder of Poets on the Coast, a yearly writing retreat that takes place in La Conner, WA, each September.
Martha Silano is the author of four books of poetry, including Reckless Lovely and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, both from Saturnalia Books. She also co-edited, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Her poems have recently appeared in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, and elsewhere. Gravity Assist, her fifth collection, will appear in early 2019 from Saturnalia Books. Martha teaches at Bellevue College.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet of Palestinian, Syrian, and Jordanian heritage. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017) and Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize. She earned her MFA in Poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop of Pacific Lutheran University. Her poems and essays have been published in Kenyon Review Online, World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, and Winter Tangerine. This year, she is the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle.