2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize winners Taylor Mali and Diana Goetsch will be reading from their books, with a signing and wine to follow, at Bluestockings Bookstore in New York City. Admission is free, and all proceeds from book sales go to the authors and Bluestockings Bookstore, a volunteer-powered and collectively-owned radical bookstore, fair trade cafe, and activist center in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Taylor Mali is one of the best-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement and one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series "Def Poetry Jam." A four-time National Poetry Slam champion, he is the author of four collections of poetry and a book of essays, What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World. In April of 2012, Mali completed his twelve-year quest to convince 1,000 people to become teachers, an achievement he commemorated by donating twelve inches of his hair to the American Cancer Society. He lives in Brooklyn, where he curates the Page Meets Stage reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club.
Diana Goetsch is the author of three full-length books of poems and five chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. From 2015-16 she wrote Life in Transition, a series of 31 essays now archived at the American Scholar, chronicling her transition, alongside issues of gender in America. Goetsch is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Donald Murray Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. She has made her living as a teacher in New York City public schools and the prison system, and is the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow at The New School.