Join us for a special group poetry reading featuring five female poets from the Twin Cities!
featuring… Ethna McKiernan, Isadora Gruye, Peuo Tuy, Katie Vagnino, and Sonia Greenfield.
Ethna McKiernan has been twice awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board grant in poetry, most recently in 2011 for the completion of Sky Thick With Fireflies. McKiernan’s first book Caravan (Dedalus Press and Midwest Villages & Voices, Minneapolis) was a Minnesota Book Award Nominee. Of her second book, The One Who Swears You Can’t Start Over (Salmon Poetry), The Bloomsbury Review wrote, “McKiernan seems to write because she has to, and graces her verse with resonance because she can. She stands out among the ranks of poets for her ability to match language to subject, sound to sense.” McKiernan ran an Irish book distribution business (Irish Books and Media) for over two decades and has worked the past four years for a non-profit serving the Minneapolis homeless.
Isadora Gruye is a writer and photographer living in Minnesota. She believes in cartographers and beekeepers but has little need for maps or honey. She is the editor and co-founder of Nice Cage Literary Magazine, and her work has appeared in many places in the tactile and virtual world. She is a Loft Mentor Series alum, and she performs regularly with the Rolling Thunder Poetry Review.
Peuo (pbaou) Tuy is a 1.5 generation Khmer spoken word poet and educator. Her poetry collection, Khmer Girl (2014), is inspired by the traumas of her life, including her family escaping the killing fields of their native Cambodia and enduring the inequities of life as refugees in the United States. Peuo is the winner of Long Beach Arts Council grant, the Pushcart Prize Nominee for her poem Hasbro Neon Light Brights, and is a founding member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association. Peuo was also selected for the Florida Literary Arts Coalition Writers’ Circuit 2018-2019 Book Tour and awarded the Critical Refugees Studies Collective grant. Her work has appeared in several online and print anthologies and magazines. During her free time she loves to swim, travel, watch movies and TV shows, and devour dark chocolate cakes.
Katie Vagnino is a poet, educator, and freelance writer originally from St. Louis. She has published essays and reviews in the Star Tribune, Time Out New York, and the Verge, and her poetry has appeared in literary journals, magazines, and on public transit. Katie has an MFA from Emerson College and has taught creative writing at UW-Eau Claire, the Loft, and currently leads a monthly poetry workshop at Boneshaker Books on the first Wednesday of every month. She especially enjoys writing in forms that use meter, rhyme, or repetition and helping other poets overcome their anxieties about formal poetry. Katie is also the co-founder of Post-It Poetics, a guerrilla poetry project whose mission is to cover the world in poetry, one post-it at a time (#postitpoetics). You can learn more about Katie and read her work on her website, katievagnino.com.
Sonia Greenfield was born and raised in Peekskill, New York, and her her collection of prose poems, Letdown, is forthcoming in spring of 2020 with White Pine Press as part of the Marie Alexander Series. Her chapbook, American Parable, won the 2017 Autumn House Press/Coal Hill Review prize, and her first full-length collection, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer's Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in a variety of places, including in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and Willow Springs. She lives with her husband, son, and two rescue dogs in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College.