Where: Milkweed building, corner of 39th and (3820) East Lake. Upstairs. Entrance just west of Milkweed (the former Blue Moon coffee house); up the stairs and to the left. Not wheel-chair accessible. Plentiful street parking.
Best to arrive 10-20 minutes early to get coffee and food/dessert from Milkweed, and to be seated by 7:30 so we can begin on time. The venue will easily hold about 35; after that, standing or floor-sitting room only. The early bird gets the seat. Please occupy the close seats first. Be an up-front person.
Original poems read/performed by their creators: Max Garland, Bronson Lemer, Anna George Meek, Leslie Adrienne Miller.
Max Garland is the author of The Word We Used for It, winner of the 2017-18 Brittingham Poetry Prize. Previous books include The Postal Confessions, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and Hunger Wide as Heaven, which won the Cleveland State Poetry Center Open Competition. He has received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, a Michener Fiction fellowship, inclusion in Best American Short Stories, a Bush Foundation literary fellowship, and fellowships in both poetry and fiction from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Born and raised in Kentucky, where he worked as a rural letter carrier on the route where he was born, he is Professor Emeritus at UW-Eau Claire, recent Writer-in-Residence for the city of Eau Claire, and the former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin.
Bronson Lemer is the author of The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2011). His work has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Southeast Review, & Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (Random House, 2006). He is a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow and lives in St. Paul. He’s at work on a new collection of essays.
Anna George Meek has published in dozens of national journals such as Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The Yale Review. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and two Minnesota State Arts Board grants. Her work has appeared on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac and has been selected multiple times for both Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Her first book, Acts of Contortion, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry; her chapbook Engraved won the Snowbound Chapbook Competition. Her second full-length book The Genome Rhapsodies won the Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Press. Meek lives with her husband and daughter where she sings professionally and is a professor of English in the Twin Cities.
Leslie Adrienne Miller’s sixth collection of poems is Y from Graywolf Press. Her previous collections include The Resurrection Trade and Eat Quite Everything You See (Graywolf Press), and Yesterday Had a Man In It, Ungodliness and Staying Up For Love (Carnegie Mellon University Press). She has been the recipient of the Loft McKnight Award of Distinction, two Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships in Poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and the PEN Southwest Discovery Award. She has also held residencies and fellowships with Le Château de Lavigny, Fundación Valparaíso, Literarisches Colloquium, and Hawthornden Castle. Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, she holds degrees in creative writing and English from Stephens College, the University of Missouri, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the University of Houston. http://lesliemillerpoet.com/
Before and after: Milkweed, downstairs, has coffee, sandwiches, desserts. Merlin’s Rest, a bar/restaurant 3 blocks west, has a full bar, good food, a late hours kitchen, and reserved seating for Midstream attendees.
