PSA Reading Series: Rae Armantrout & Jennifer Chang

Writing for the Poetry Foundation, David Woo says that Rae Armantrout’s recent book Finalists (Wesleyan 2022) “emanates the radiant astonishment of living thought.” Charles Bernstein says, “Her sheer, often hilarious, ingenuity is an aesthetic triumph.” Her 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. Her other books with Wesleyan include Partly: New and Selected PoemsJust SayingMoney Shot and Versed. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2007 she received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including PoetryConjunctionsLana TurnerThe Nation, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of BooksBombHarpers, the Paris ReviewPostmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. Retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics, she is the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including American Poetry ReviewThe Believer, Best American Poetry 2012 and 2022The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Yale Review and has been honored with fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency and with the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin.