Joey Belonger, Araceli Esparza, Megan Milks, Marcelle Richards, Alaura Seidl

WATERSHED READING SERIES

Friday, April 15, 8pm

press release: Join us for our next poetry reading in conversation with the Toast exhibition features poets Joey Belonger, Araceli Esparza, Megan Milks, Marcelle Richards and Alaura Seidl. Doors open at 7pm, reading at 8pm. This event is free and open to the public but a $3 donation helps us keep offering great programming like this.

Five poets respond to our current exhibit Toast by Alaura Seidl. Toast is an installation and video-based work reconciling the tension between private confrontations and public spectacles, contemplating both what people do spontaneously and what people perform consciously. The exhibition, screened in its final form, is born of a lifetime of intimate encounters and one night of filming with community members. Alaura is negotiating with memories while investigating accountability for social dilemmas, celebrating queer identity and cleansing the palate.

Abour our readers:

Joey Belonger is the recipient of the Hicks Prize in Poetry, the Tichenor Prize, and the Bertrand A. Goldgar London Fellowship. Recent poems have appeared in Tropos. He lives and works in Madison.

In between parenting, teaching and saving words for later, Araceli Esparza writes bilingual-bicultural picture books and poetry. She is a graduate of Hamline's MFA in Children's Literature.

Megan Milks is the author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, winner of the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award finalist; as well as three chapbooks, most recently The Feels. They are Fiction Editor at The Account and previously edited The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, 2011-2013 and Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives.

Marcelle Richards is a local writer, artist, shamanic practitioner, and nature enthusiast. They are happiest on the open road, under canopies of trees, and beneath wide starry skies. The love of their life is a bull terrier named Claire.

Alaura Seidl is a queer+feminist educator, writer, and socially engaged artist based in Madison, WI. Alaura is the director of the ArtWrite Collective and is a community arts lecturer at UW-Madison. Find more from Alaura at .