Derrick Austin, Rebecca Dunham, Jacques Rancourt, Casey Thayer

press release:

A Room of One's Own welcomes four excellent current and former Wisconsin poets for a reading!

About Derrick Austin: Rich in religious and artistic imagery, Trouble the Water is an intriguing exploration of race, sexuality, and identity, particularly where self-hood is in constant flux. These intimate, sensual poems interweave pop culture and history—moving from the Bible through several artistic eras—to interrogate what it means to be, as Austin says, "fully human as a queer, black body" in 21st century America. A Cave Canem fellow, Austin's work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, New England Review, Nimrod, and other anthologies and publications. He was a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

About Rebecca Dunham: A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways—unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster. Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can—and, perhaps, should—be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity. Dunham is the author of three previous books of poetry: Glass Armonica, winner of Milkweed Editions’ 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize; The Flight Cage; and The Miniature Room, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. She has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and was the 2005–6 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellow in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

About Jacques Rancourt: Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Novena, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize (Pleiades Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets 2014, among others. He has held poetry fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.

About Casey Thayer: Casey Thayer is the author of Self-Portrait with Spurs and Sulfur (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). His poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, North American Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A native Wisconsinite, he currently lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges of Chicago. In a collection of persona poems and odes, Self-Portrait with Spurs and Sulfur explores the possibilities of storytelling and interrogates the postmodern fractured self. Alive with sound, playful, and imaginative, one reviewer describes the book as “a rollicking, sexually-charged tour-de-force of language, a self-portrait which refuses the glib mannerism of the genre and which shows us, indeed, what a self can be.”