Apr 6th 2023
Join us as we welcome Jessica Laser, S. Yarberry, Jake Fournier and Sasha Debevec-McKenney for a reading in celebration of Jessica’s new book Planet Drill.

“In an era of disintegration, frack and melt, any human who wants to move away from habits of harm must feel for new ways to inhabit PLANET DRILL, using our signature bodily function: language. In Jessica Laser’s Planet Drill, human language is like the slime-mold quietly recreating the subway map of Tokyo: deft, resourceful, pliant, responsive, and finally, collectively, wise.” — Joyelle McSweeney

Jessica Laser was born and raised in Chicago. She is the author of two books of poems, Planet Drill (Futurepoem Books, 2022), winner of the Other Futures Award, and Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a PhD candidate in English at The University of California, Berkeley, where she co-curated the Holloway Series in Poetry.

S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming in, AGNI, Guernica, Tin House, Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, Notre Dame Review, miscellaneous zines, among others. Smith‘s other writings can be found in Bomb Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and Annulet: A Journal of Poetics. They currently serve as the Poetry Editor of The Spectacle; they also run a small magazine called Tyger Quarterly. S. has their MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in literature at Northwestern University where they study twentieth and twenty-first century receptions of William Blake. Their first book of poems, A Boy in the City, is out now from Deep Vellum.

Jake Fournier holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chicago, where he teaches creative writing and the humanities. His academic work can be found in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Literature, and his poetry has appeared most recently in Lana TurnerAnnulet, and the Partisan Hotel.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the UW Institute for Creative Writing and she received her MFA from New York University. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale ReviewTriQuarterlyGranta, and elsewhere. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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