Topaz Winters, Patrycja Humienik, Clemonce Heard, Aurora Shimshak

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Jared Ho

A close-up of Topaz Winters.

Topaz Winter

A quartet of poets meets to celebrate the fifth anniversary edition of Topaz Winters' book Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing with 10 new poems. Winters, who will read the self-described “ravenous, reckless, skin-searching” poetry as part of the event, is editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press. She is joined by UW-Madison MFA candidate Patrycja Humienik, 2019-2020 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow Clemonce Heard, and rising Madison area poet Aurora Shimshak, who also teaches at Oakhill Correctional Institution. Winters' reading is one stop on a 14-bookstore Midwestern tour, which doesn’t happen all that often anymore for any writer, much less a poet.

media release:  A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Topaz Winters, Patrycja Humienik, Clemonce Heard, and Aurora Shimshak to celebrate the five year anniversary edition of Topaz's book Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing. Join us for this incredible lineup of poets followed by a discussion between Clemonce and Topaz. 

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

About the Book

In its five year anniversary edition, Topaz Winters’ Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing returns with ten new poems, a revised body of work, & a foreword by bestselling author Blythe Baird. An examination of desire as religion, food as compulsion, & illness as a gut reflex in the face of girlhood’s little violences, Portrait haunts the landscape of self-mythology & cuts straight into its own marrow. This book is a howl in the night, a fracture through the dark, as omnivorous & revelatory today as it was five years ago. “Must I say it to survive?” asks its speaker, balanced on the knife’s edge between confessional & manifesto. “Then I will.”

Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022), Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024), & poems for the sound of the sky before thunder (Math Paper Press 2017). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press, an independent, international, & interdisciplinary publishing project, & as co-editor of Kopi Break, a journal of new Singapore poetry. Her work has been published by Waxwing, The Drift, & Poets.org, profiled in Vogue, The Straits Times, & The Business Times, & performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre for Fiction, & the Singapore Writers Festival. She lives between New York & Singapore.

Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor, and performance artist. She is the author of We Contain Landscapes, forthcoming with Tin House in 2025. An MFA candidate at UW-Madison, she serves as Events Director for The Seventh Wave and an editor for the Community Anthologies project. Patrycja has developed writing and movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Arts+Literature Laboratory, Northwest Film Forum, in prisons, and elsewhere. You can find her on twitter & instagram (@jej_sen).

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. 

Aurora Shimshak grew up in several rural communities and small cities in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2023, Copper Nickel, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She teaches writing to undergraduate students and those incarcerated at Oakhill Correctional Institution. Her favorite spring ephemeral is the bloodroot.