Clemonce Heard, Josh Kalscheur

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Anda Marie Photograph/Melissa Lukenbaugh

Josh Kalscheur (left) and Clemonce Heard.

Josh Kalscheur (left) and Clemonce Heard.

media release: Room of One's Own is thrilled to host Clemonce Heard and Josh Kalscheur for this poetry reading and conversation. Join us to hear from these excellent poets!

This is an in person event at A Room of One's Own Bookstore

About the books

In Tragic City the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre comes to a head in these poems that investigate the incident's resounding trauma with lyric and historic precision. The absence of reckoning a century after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is soldered together by a series of poems based on Heard's time living on the fringes of the city's art district and what was once Greenwood, Tulsa's thriving Black neighborhood. 

Tidal focuses on Chuuk State, a group of islands that are a part of the Federated States of Micronesia. This focus encompasses Micronesia’s morality, its taboos and myths, and how information and stories disseminate between villages, social groups, ethnicities, classes, and genders. Using persona, these poems explore and challenge the idea of witness.

Clemonce Heard's work has appeared or is forthcoming from AGNI, Cimarron Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. He earned a BFA in graphic communications from Northwestern State University, and an MFA in creative writing from Oklahoma State University. Heard has been awarded a 2018-2019 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the 2019-2020 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the 2021 Sala Diaz artist-in-residence in San Antonio, Texas, a 2022 Hambidge Center Residency, a 2022-2023 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2023 Helene Wurlitzer Residency. 

Josh Kalscheur is the author of Tidal (2015). He was a Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, a visiting Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY-Fredonia, as well as a recipient of a Bread Loaf scholarship. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Slate, The Nation and FENCE among others. He is a lecturer in the English Department at UW-Madison, and has a dog named Truffles.