hosted by: Al Filreis

rspv: register here to attend in person

About the Authors

An American poet and artist, SALLY VAN DOREN is the author of four poetry collections, including Sibilance (LSU Press 2023) and Sex at Noon Taxes which received the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been featured in Poetry Daily, Poetry London, The Moth, The New Republic, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, NPR, PBS, The Poetry Foundation, American Life in Poetry and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her ongoing poetic memoir, “The Sense Series,” was part of a multi-media installation performance at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. As a visual artist, she exhibits regularly and her work is held in distinguished private and corporate collections and appears in art publications such as the cover of The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (UPenn Press 2022) and The Nashville Review. A St. Louis native, Van Doren holds a BA from Princeton in Comparative Literature and an MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has taught poetry at the 92nd Street Y, Washington University and other public and private educational institutions. She works from her studio in West Cornwall, CT.

MICHELLE TARANSKY received a BA in English with honors from The University of Chicago and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. The author of Sorry Was In The Woods (2013), and Barn Burned, Then (2009), winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Prize selected by Marjorie Welish, Factory Hollow Press recently published her chapbook Abramowitz-Grossberg (2020). In 2014, she was awarded the Beltran Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring at Penn. A member of the Kelly Writers House hub since coming to Penn to work as the Assistant to the Director in 2008, Taransky continues to host the Whenever We Feel Like It reading series and work as a Contributing Editor for Penn’s poetics journal, Jacket2.