Poems: A Reading From New Collections

Lawrence Raab is the author of seven previous collections of poems, including What We Don’t Know About Each Other, which was a finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as numerous residences at Yaddo and MacDowell. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College. The poems in Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo Press), a 2015 National Book Award Longlist selection for Poetry have been translated into an American idiom that is canny, sly, defeated, pessimistic, resilient, and perplexingly knowledgeable about the human predicament. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015

Beth Bachmann’s previous poetry book, Temper, received the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Do Not Rise received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Boston Review, and Southern Review and have been anthologized in TheBest New Poets 2005 and 2007. Her honors also include the American Poet Prize and fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. Bachmann teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University.

Malachi Black’s poems appear in AGNI, Boston Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. The recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Black has also received fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center, the University of Utah, and Yaddo. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of San Diego. His most recent collection Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press) press all points along the spectrum of human positions, from sickness, isolation, and insomniac disarray to serenity, wonder, and spiritual yearning.

Ralph Hamilton is editor of RHINO. He has an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College. His poems have appeared in Court Green, CutBank, Pirene’s Fountain, Blackbird, and other journals. He has had residencies at Ragdale and the Anderson Center, and later served on the board of the Ragdale Foundation. He judged Fifth Wednesday Journal’s Prize in Poetry in Fall 2013, and served as their Guest Poetry Editor in 2014. He was recently nominated for Best New Poet 2015 and Over the Rainbow Books, a book list of the American Library Association, 2015. Ralph was recently selected as Guest Editor for the debut volume of Glass Lyre Press’s Aeolian Harp anthology.