New Poems: A Reading

Amber Tamblyn is a contributing writer for the Poetry Foundation and the author of two previous books of poetry, Free Stallion and Bang Ditto. As an actress, she has been nominated for an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and an Independent Spirit award. In her latest collection of poetry, Dark Sparkler (HarperPerennial), the lives of more than twenty-five actresses lost before their time are explored. Featuring subjects from Marilyn Monroe and Frances Farmer to Dana Plato and Brittany Murphy—and paired with original artwork commissioned for the book by luminaries including David Lynch, Adrian Tomine, Marilyn Manson, and Marcel Dzama—Dark Sparkler is a surprising and provocative collection from a young artist of wide-ranging talent, culminating in an extended, confessional epilogue of astonishing candor and poetic command.

David Tomas Martinez's work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Forklift, Gulf Coast, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Spork Press, Toe Good, and many others. Martinez has been featured or written about in Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, NPR's All Things Considered, Poetry, Buzzfeed, and many others. He earned his MFA at San Diego State University, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Houston's Creative Writing program, and is the Reviews and Interviews Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. His debut collection of poetry, Hustle, won the New England Book Festival's prize in poetry, the Devil's Kitchen Reading Award, and honorable mention in the Antonio Cisneros Del Moral prize. He is the 2015 winner of the InPrint Verlaine Poetry Prize.

Jonathan Moody is a Cave Canem graduate fellow whose poetry has appeared in African American Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, the Common, Crab Orchard Review, good foot, Tidal Basin Review, Xavier Review, Beloit Poetry Journal , and the anthology Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade , among other publications. He is also the author of The Doomy Poems (2012). Olympic Butter Gold: Poems (Northwestern University Press) winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, responds to Chuck D’s claim that "if there was a HIP-HOP or Rap Olympics, I really don’t think the United States would get Gold, Silver or Brass." From the poem "Opening Ceremony," in the voice of a heroin addict struggling to use Lady Liberty’s torch to cook "The American Dream," to "Dear 2Pac," an autobiographical account of teaching Tupac Shakur’s poetry to engage high school students indifferent to literature, Moody shares a worldview that is simultaneously apocalyptic and promising.