Margaret Yapp, John Paul Martinez

media release:  A Room of One's Own is excited to host Margaret Yapp and John Paul Martinez for a poetry reading celebrating Margaret's debut book of poetry Green For Luck. Come on down and delight in the written word with us!

This is an in person event at a Room of One's Own.

About the book

Green for Luck is a book that wanders green city blocks, denying happenstance and making lists. Yapp attends to mundanity as a string that holds us close to the earth, building quotidian divinities, landing jokes just to make sure we’re listening. In this book, words push the left and upper margins, forcing the body of the page to act as negative space, a place where the light gets in. Green for Luck speaks through Scrabble, through text messages, through gossip and snippets of conversation and well-worn idioms that crack open in Yapp’s steady hands.

Margaret Yapp is from Iowa City, Iowa. She works as the managing editor at Prompt Press and runs Rampage Party Press, an ongoing hand-printed broadside project. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Second Factory, Asphalte, and elsewhere.

John Paul Martinez is a Filipino Canadian-American poet writing out of the Midwest. He was a finalist for the 2019 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and 1/2 K Prize, 2019 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and 2018 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest. Their work appears in Ninth Letter, Third Coast, Nashville Review, Asian American Writers' Workshop, The Slowdown podcast, and elsewhere. He holds a degree in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.