Readings by Michael Dumanis and Dorothea Lasky, followed by a reception/signing.

Open to the public. All attendees are required to RSVP in advance; please click here

About the Authors:

Michael Dumanis is the author of the poetry collections Creature (Four Way Books, 2023) and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. He is also coeditor (with poet Cate Marvin) of the younger poets’ anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande) and (with poet Kevin Prufer) of Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades).

His poems have appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Colorado Review, The Common, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, The Hopkins Review, Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, and POETRY; in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Project; and on the Poetry Society of America website. His writing has been recognized with residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy; an Ohio Arts Council grant; a Cuyahoga Country Community Partnership for Arts and Culture Creative Workforce Fellowship; and the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award.

Born in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union, Dumanis emigrated with his family at the age of five and grew up in Western New York: the Buffalo suburb of Amherst and the Rochester suburb of Brighton. He holds a BA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Previously a professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University and Cleveland State University, where he also served as director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Dumanis joined the Bennington College Literature Faculty in the Fall of 2012. In addition to being a member of the Literature faculty, he serves as Director of the Poetry at Bennington reading series and Editor of Bennington Review, a journal he relaunched in 2016, after a thirty-year hiatus

Dorothea Lasky is the author, most recently, of The Shining (October 2023) and Animal, published in 2019 in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She is also the author of Milk (Wave Books, 2018), Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). She is also the author of six chapbooks: Matter: A Picturebook (Argos Books, 2012), The Blue Teratorn (Yes Yes Books, 2012), Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), Tourmaline (Transmission Press, 2008), The Hatmaker’s Wife (2006), Art ( H_NGM_N Press, 2005), and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004). Born in St. Louis in 1978, she has poems that have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, MAKE magazine, Phoebe, Poets & Writers Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, and 6×6, among other places. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013), co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (with Alex Dimitrov, Flatiron Books, 2019) and is a 2013 Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in New York City.