Saturnalia Books hosts its annual poetry reading at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. This year’s program includes Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize 2016 winner, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Cave Canem fellow and winner of the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize selected by DA Powell for Telepathologies. In Cortney’s own words: “Telepathologies is an uncompromising exploration of the violences surrounding the singular and collective black body, and consequently, is an excavation intent on finding the soul of a nation, our nation, that has yet to come to terms with its bloody past and present.” His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, The Journal, New England Review, Pleiades, River Styx, Spillway, TriQuarterly and elsewhere.
Also reading will be Allison Titus, author of the poetry collections, The True Book of Animal Homes (Saturnalia Books, 2017), Sum of Every Lost Ship, and a novel, The Arsonist’s Song Has Nothing to Do with Fire. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Tin House, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. In 2011 she was the recipient of a fellowship from the NEA. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she is at work on a book of poems about tears and the history of crying.
The other two poets reading this year include Stephanie Rogers and Fritz Ward, recipient of the Cecil Hemley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Stephanie Rogers is the author of Plucking the Stinger (Saturnalia Books, 2016), and her poems have appeared in journals such as Pleaides, Ploughshares, Southern Review, New Ohio Review, and Third Coast, among others. Three of her poems were selected for inclusion in the emerging writers anthology Best New Poets (2013, 2009, 2006.) Fritz Ward is the author of Tsunami Diorama. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Blackbird, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere