Friday, Dec 03, 2010

Location:
Ken Sanders Rare Books

Ken Sanders Rare Books is pleased to announce a reading and book signing featuring contributors to the 2010 Best New Poets anthology on Friday, December 3^rd at 7:00 p.m. at our downtown bookstore (268 South 200 East). Readers will include Salt Lake poets Lisa Fay Coutley and dawn lonsinger as well as Seattle poets Luke Johnson and Matthew Kelsey. Copies of Best New Poets ($11.95 paperback) will be available for purchase and signing at the event. this event is free and open to the public.

Entering its fifth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it’s being practiced today.

Lisa Fay Coutley’s chapbook, In the Carnival of Breathing, won the Fall 2009 Black River Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in mid-2011. Her first chapbook, Back-Talk, won the ROOMS Chapbook Contest (Articles Press, 2010). She received her MFA from Northern Michigan University, where she was poetry editor for Passages North, and she is currently pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. Her work has appeared most recently or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2010, Cave Wall, Blackbird, 32 Poems, Fugue, Hollins Critic, and Poet Lore, among others.

Luke Johnson is the author of After the Ark (New York Quarterly Books, forthcoming 2011). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Epoch, Greensboro Review, Poetry East, and twice have been featured in Best New Poets. He has received awards and scholarships from the Academy of American Poets, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He teaches and writes in Seattle, Washington.

dawn lonsinger received her MFA from Cornell University, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Utah, where she is managing editor of Western Humanities Review. Her poems have appeared in New Orleans Review, The Massachusetts Review, American Letters & Commentary, Sonora Review, Subtropics, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was chosen by Claudia Emerson for inclusion in Best New Poets 2010.  Her chapbook, the linoleum crop, was selected by Thomas Lux as the winner of the 2007 Jeanne Duval Editions Chapbook Contest; and her second chapbook, The Nested Object, was published in 2009 by Dancing Girl Press.  She, like most living organisms, has a thing for light

Matthew Kelsey was born in Glens Falls, NY. He is the founder of Pusteblume: a Journal of Translations, and his poems have appeared in Clarion, Center and Hawk & Whippoorwill. He received his BA from Boston University and recently completed his MFA at the University of Washington. He currently lives in Seattle.