Wednesday

Jen Benka is the author of Pinko (Hanging Loose), A Box of Longing With Fifty Drawers (Soft Skull Press), the artist book Preamble (Booklyn), and with Carol Mirakove, 1,138 (Belladonna). Her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and on websites including make/shift, HOW2 and Elective Affinities, and will be included in the forthcoming anthology America Now and Here (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). She lived in NYC for close to a decade where she worked as the managing director of Poets & Writers and curated public poetry events including a marathon reading of the complete poems of Emily Dickinson. She recently relocated to San Francisco, where she serves on the board of Small Press Traffic.

Laura Mullen is a Professor at Louisiana State University. She is the author of three collections of poetry—The Surface, After I Was Dead, and Subject—and two hybrid texts, The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Prizes for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, and she has been awarded an LSU Board of Regents ATLAS grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships and is a frequent visitor at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her fourth collection of poetry is forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2011.