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29th Showcase Opening Reading: Wo Chan, Erika Meitner, Fred Moten, & Charif Shanahan
December 14 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Join us for the opening of the 29th Poets House Showcase, a literary exhibition and reading series that captures the breadth of contemporary poetry publishing. Delve into landmark collections with Wo Chan, Erika Meitner, Fred Moten, and Charif Shanahan. This event is presented with generous support from Battery Park City Authority.
Wo Chan reads from Togetherness (Nightboat, 2022), Erika Meitner reads from Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022), Fred Moten reads from Perennial Fashion Presence Falling (Wave Books, 2023), and Charif Shanahan reads from Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023).
This reading accompanies the Showcase exhibition opening, a panoramic display of thousands of poetry publications: books, chapbooks, broadsides, and poetry-related nonfiction published during 2022 and 2023. Items in the Showcase are organized by publisher, offering a unique opportunity to discover new work and experience each publisher’s unique editorial voice. The Showcase will be on view during library hours from December 14th through February 14th.
Reading and conversation: 4-5pm, Kray Hall
About the Poets:
Wo Chan, who performs as The Illustrious Pearl, is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of TOGETHERNESS (Nightboat, 2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, and the Architectural Digest Expo.
Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010)—a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry; and Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022). Her poems have been published most recently in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, The New Republic, Orion, and elsewhere. Her seventh book, Assembled Audience, is due out from Milkweed Editions in 2026. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Fred Moten is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and criticism. He lives in New York with his partner, Laura Harris, and their children, Lorenzo and Julian, and works in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University.
Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: poems (Tin House, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry; and Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing, (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University.