Poetry reading: Kristen Case, Karen Weiser, and Jennifer Firestone

Join the MIT Press Bookstore in welcoming poets Kristen Case, Karen Weiser, and Jennifer Firestone.

Kristen Case is the author of American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011). Her first poetry collection, Little Arias (New Issues, 2015) won the Maine literary Award for Poetry in 2016, and her second collection, Principles of Economics (Switchback Books, 2019) won the Gatewood Prize. She is co-editor of the volumes Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments (Cambridge UP, 2016) and 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the 19th Century Archive (forthcoming, Milkweed Editions). She directs Thoreau’s Kalendar: A Digital Archive of the Phenological Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau and The New Commons Project, a public humanities initiative sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. She teaches American Literature at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Karen Weiser is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Or, The Ambiguities (UDP, 2015) and To Light Out (UDP, 2010), as well as chapbooks: Dear Pierre (Well Greased Press), Placefullness (UDP), and Pitching Woo (Cy Press). Look for an essay of hers on Edgar Allan Poe, gun violence, and race in 21/19: Readings in Proximity (Milkweed Press, 2019). Karen is currently in training in psychoanalysis and works as a therapist at ICP in New York City.

Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry and four chapbooks including Story (UDP), Ten (BlazeVOX [books]), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Swimming Pool (DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). She co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books) and is collaborating with Marcella Durand on a book about Feminist Avant-garde Poetics. Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children and Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim. She won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press’ Robert Creeley Memorial Prize. Firestone is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is also the Director of their Academic Fellows pedagogy program.