Brynn Saito's new book of poems is Power Made Us Swoon. David Rivard says, “Brynn Saito is committed to seeing what is most human about us, without resort to the tactics of noise and exaggeration. It is not easy to be austerely uncertain and open-hearted at the same time, but she pulls it off beautifully.” Her previous collection is The Palace of Contemplating Departure. She is a winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award, was a finalist for a Northern California Book Award, and is a recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship and a Poets 11 award from the San Francisco Public Library.
Kathleen Winter's new book of poems I will not kick my friends won the 2017 Elixir Poetry Prize; this reading and celebration is the book launch. Bob Hicok says, “Kathleen Winter is unusually attuned to the intersection of the imagined and the common place. She weaves her loves—personal, artistic, intellectual—into her daily life, making this a book of passionate intimacies.” Her first book of poems, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, won the Texas Institute of Letters first book Award.