Watershed Reading Series

media release: Join us on Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 7 PM for our July Watershed Reading featuring prose writer Jane Barnard, and poets Chessy Normile and James Pollock.

James Pollock’s most recent book of poems is Durable Goods (Véhicule Press, 2022), winner of the 2022 Edna Meudt Poetry Book Prize. His first book, Sailing to Babylon (Able Muse Press, 2012), was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry, and winner of an Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association. His other books are You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (The Porcupine's Quill, 2012), and The Essential Daryl Hine (The Porcupine's Quill, 2015). His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, Plume, and many other journals, and have also won the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Magma Editors' Prize, and the Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review. He graduated from York University in Toronto, earned a Ph.D. from the University of Houston, and is now Professor of English at Loras College.

Chessy Normile is the author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, selected by Li-Young Lee for the 2020 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and was most recently the 2022-2023 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She edits a zine series called Girl Blood Info.

Jane Barnard is a Madison writer as well as a visual artist/teacher. Jane has a Master’s Degree in English. Her publications include The Bitter Oleander Press (translation of French Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret), the Driftless Writers Anthology, and others. She’ll read from her hybrid memoir-in-progress, working title Days, Numbered: Or, the Poet as Pain Relief. Jane’s work reflects her long love affair with writers and writing. She imagines a reader both erudite and tender, a reader who enjoys irreverent wit and riffs on language and who’s also moved by a journey of surviving depression and addiction with hard-won grace.