COUPLET is a quarterly reading series, produced, curated and hosted by poet Leah Umansky since 2011. It features both emerging and established poets. COUPLET is co-hosted by The Red Room in NYC and sponsored by Poets and Writers. This event will be hybrid and on Zoom. Click here to register for virtual attendance.
Readers include:
Mary Biddinger (Zoom)
Mary Biddinger’s most recent book is Department of Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). Her poems have been published in Bennington Review, Crazyhorse, Couplet Poetry, and Pithead Chapel. Flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Always Crashing, DIAGRAM, Gone Lawn, On the Seawall, and West Trestle Review. Her current project is a flash fiction novella that chronicles the adventures of two graduate school roommates living in Chicago in the late 1990s. Biddinger teaches at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program, and edits the Akron Series in Poetry for the University of Akron.
Dorianne Laux (Zoom)
Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux’s most recent collection is Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected, W.W. Norton. She is also the author of The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Laux teaches poetry at Pacific University. In 2020, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Ananda Lima (Zoom)
Ananda Lima’s poetry collection, Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), is the winner of the Hudson Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks: Vigil (Get Fresh Books, 2021), Tropicália (Newfound, 2021), Amblyopia (Bull City Press, 2020), and Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural Work-In-Progress Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers, for her fiction manuscript-in-progress. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Newark.
Adrian Matejka is the author of six books, most recently a mixed media collection inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books, 2021), and a collection of poems Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021). His book The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His first graphic novel, Last On His Feet, is forthcoming from Liveright in February 2023. He is the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University Bloomington and served as Poet Laureate of Indiana in 2018-19.
Michael Montlack
Michael Montlack is author of two poetry collections, most recently Daddy (NYQ Books), and editor of the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His poems recently appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, december, The Offing, Cincinnati Review, and Poet Lore. His photographs have appeared in Phoebe, Northwest Review and Gertrude. He lives in NYC.
Joan Kwon Glass
Joan Kwon Glass (she/her) is the biracial, Korean American author of NIGHT SWIM, winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest, & is author of three chapbooks. She is Editor-in-Chief of Harbor Review, a Brooklyn Poets mentor, poet laureate of Milford, CT & poetry co-editor of West Trestle Review. She is a proud, Smith College graduate & has been a public school educator for 20 years. Her poems have appeared in Diode, Rattle, The Rupture, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Night Heron Barks, Sweet Tree Review & many others & have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Sundress Anthology Best of the Net. She grew up in Michigan & South Korea & lives in Connecticut with her family.