When: Thursday September 9, 2021, 7:30–8:30pm CDT.
Where: Live online via Zoom, from the comfort of your own home. The Zoom invitation will be posted on the website at 6am on the morning of the reading. If you don't already have it, you should get the Zoom client installed on your device ahead of time.
We are limited to 100 Zoom participants. The reading will be recorded and posted to YouTube afterwards; please check the website for details.
Original poems from Marion Gómez, Chavonn Williams Shen, John Schenk and Bryan Thao Worra.
Marion Gómez is a poet and teaching artist based in Minneapolis. She has been awarded grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Literary Center, and Intermedia Arts. Her work has appeared in La Bloga, Mizna, Waterstone Review, Saint Paul Almanac, among others.
John Schenk has been writing poetry for the past 15 years, beginning with a Jude Nutter Loft class taken in the creases of a general management career and continuing more seriously over the past several years with Deborah Keenan and others. John writes about family, seasons lost and found, and “the places where we find ourselves.” He’s assembled a chapbook — Echo Trail — which is awaiting its post-production finishing touches and is currently at work on a second collection with the working title, Lucky Enough. The father of two grown-up women — Rachel, the artist, and Rebecca, the idealist — John has been married to Deborah Fowler, the love of his life, for more than 40 years.
Chavonn Williams Shen was a first runner-up for The Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Contest and a Best of the Net Award finalist. She was also a Pushcart Prize nominee, a winner of the Loft Literary Center's Mentor Series and a fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature. A Tin House and VONA workshop alum, her writing has appeared in: Diode, Anomaly, Yemassee, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. When she's not teaching with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, she can be found at home obsessing over her plants. "Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero." - West African Proverb
Bryan Thao Worra is the Lao Minnesotan Poet Laureate. In 2017 he was appointed by the Governor of Minnesota to the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans. In 2012, he was selected as the Lao delegate to serve as a Cultural Olympian during the London Summer Games. He is the president of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. With over 20 awards, his writing is cited in over nine international textbooks including the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and the Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater.
Before and after: Both Milkweed, downstairs from our usual venue, and Merlin’s Rest, a bar/restaurant 3 blocks west where Midstream attendees often congregate, are once again open.
