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New Works: Kimberly Alidio, Courtney Bush, Natalie Shapero, and Emily Skillings
What do poetry, film, sound, and comedy have in common? Join us on September 16 for readings by Kimberly Alidio, Courtney Bush, Natalie Shapero, and Emily Skillings followed by a discussion and Q/A.
Kimberly Alidio will read from Traceable Relation (Fonograf Editions, 2025), a hybrid work exploring how art sustains us through grief, drawing on diasporic memory and sonic/visual media. Courtney Bush’s A Movie (Lavender Ink, 2025) blends personal narrative with cinematic reflection, recounting her experience making an 18-minute vampire film. Natalie Shapero’s Stay Dead (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) examines survival, performance, and the dark comedy of despair. Tantrums in Air (The Song Cave, 2025) shifts through poetic forms with grace and humor, reimagining the boundaries and expectations of poetry.
About the Poets:
Kimberly Alidio is the author of Traceable Relation (Fonograf Editions, 2025), and Teeter (Nightboat Books 2023), which won the Nightboat Poetry Prize (2022) and the Lambda Literary Award (2024). She is also the author of three other books of poetry: Why Letter Ellipses (selva oscura press, 2020), : once teeth bones coral : (Belladona, 2020), and after projects the resound (Black Radish Books, 2016). Her essays appear in e-flux, Poetry Foundation, Social Text, American Quarterly, and Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of the Nation and Diaspora.
Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker. She is the author of the National Poetry Series selection I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023) along with other full-length poetry collections Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022), A Movie (Lavender Ink, 2025), and The Lamb with the Talking Scroll (forthcoming from blush lit, 2025). She works in childcare and teaches poetry workshops, sometimes about Rilke, through Cool Memories.
Natalie Shapero’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collections Stay Dead (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), Popular Longing (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), and No Object (Saturnalia Books, 2013), and she has performed at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collections Fort Not (2017) and Tantrums in Air (2025) both published by The Song Cave. Her recent poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Granta, The Yale Review, and the New York Review of Books. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn.