Join us for our March Watershed reading, which is a collaboration between ALL (Arts + Literature Laboratory) and Madison College's Yahara Journal for their Equity Project. We will feature poets Dujie Tahat, Adrian Matejka, and Victoria C. Flanagan. The reading will be followed by a brief Q&A with the poets. This event will be streamed live on our YouTube channel and on our Facebook page.
Dujie Tahat is a Filipino-Jordanian immigrant living in Washington state. They are the author of Here I Am O My God, selected by Fady Joudah for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and Salat, selected by Cornelius Eady as winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry NW, ZYZZVA, Best New Poets, Asian American Literary Review and elsewhere. Dujie has earned fellowships from Hugo House, Jack Straw Writing Program, and the Poetry Foundation, as well as a work-study scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. They serve as a poetry editor for Moss and Homology Lit and cohost The Poet Salon podcast.
Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is a graduate of Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University. He is the author of the Devil's Garden, which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology, a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. Mixology was also a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. His third collection, The Big Smoke, focuses on Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion of the world, and was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Other works include Map to the Stars, Standing on the Verge / Maggot Brain (Feb. 2021), and Somebody Else Sold the World (Jul. 2021). Matejka teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington and served as Poet Laureate of Indiana for 2018-19.
Victoria C. Flanagan is the author of Glossary of Unsaid Terms, winner of Beloit Poetry Journal's 2020 Chad Walsh Chapbook prize. Flanagan's writing has also been awarded an Academy of American Poetry Prize, the Emerging Poets Prize from Palette Poetry, and a Sewanee Writer's Conference scholarship, among other honors. Their work has appeared in the Adroit Journal, The Boiler, Verse Daily, New South, Appalachian Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. A poet and essayist raised in small-town North Carolina, they hold a dual-genre MFA in poetry and nonfiction from Virginia Commonwealth University, and are the 2020-21 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.