ONLINE: Carlos Andres Gomez, Diane Kerr, Anna Leigh Knowles, Christopher Nelson

media release: Presented in partnership with the UW Program in Creative Writing, a reading celebrating the Wisconsin Poetry Series. Since 1985, the University of Wisconsin Press has published some of the most important voices in contemporary American poetry. This event will celebrate four authors for their work: Carlos Andres Gomez, Diane Kerr, Anna Leigh Knowles, and Christopher Nelson. 

Carlina Duan is a writer-educator from Michigan, and the author of the poetry collections I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) and Alien Miss (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Poets.org, The Rumpus, and other publications. Carlina received her MFA in Poetry from Vanderbilt University. She currently teaches community-engaged writing at the University of Michigan, and is a doctoral student in U-M’s Joint Program in English and Education.

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet from New York City. His debut full-length poetry collection Fractures (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) won the 2021 Midwest Book Award for Poetry, the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal, the 2021 Georgia Author of the Year Award, and was selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2020 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Winner of the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal and the International Book Award for Poetry, Gómez has been published in New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, BuzzFeed Reader, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. For more, please visit CarlosLive.com.

Diane Kerr’s second book, Perigee, won the 2020 Brittingham Prize. She is the author of Butterfly (WordTech Communications, 2014) and a chapbook One (Parallel Press, 2007). In 2020 she won the Palette Poetry Prize for a Previously Published Poem. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Pearl, Poetry East, South Dakota Review, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. Kerr has been awarded fellowships to Ropewalk and Hedgebrook. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, has taught writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and mentors poets through the Madwomen in the Attic Creative Writing Program at Carlow University in Pittsburgh.

Anna Leigh Knowles is the author of Conditions of the Wounded (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021). Her work appears in Blackbird, Indiana Review, Memorious, The Missouri Review online, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, storySouth, and others. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, she has also received scholarships from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, the Bear River Writers’ Workshop and the San Miguel de Allende Writers’ Conference. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and currently teaches English in Trinidad and Tobago.

Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and three chapbooks, including Blue House, recipient of a New American Poets Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. He is the founder and editor of the journal Under a Warm Green Linden and Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation.