Radical Poetry Reading with Chris Martin

Chris Martin is a neurodivergent poet and educator whose fourth book of poetry, Things to Do in Hell, is fresh from Coffee House Press. His first book of essays, May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future is forthcoming from HarperOne. He is the co-founder and executive director of Unrestricted Interest, an organization dedicated to helping neurodivergent learners transform their lives through writing. He lives in Minneapolis, where he also teaches at Hamline University and Carleton College.

Hannah Emerson is a non-speaking autistic poet from Lafayette, NY, on the historical land of the Onondaga Nation. Her writing has been featured in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Nine Mile, and Unearthed. Her first chapbook of poems, ‘You Are Helping this Great Universe Explode’, was published by Unrestricted Editions in 2020.

Adam Wolfond is a 18-year old non-speaking autistic/neurodiverse artist, poet, and university lecturer. His chapbook In Way of Music Water Answers Toward Questions Other Than What Is Autism is forthcoming from Unrestricted Interest. He attends high school and is the co-founder of The A Collective in Toronto, where he works in visual art and poetry and collaborates on the PhD dissertation Neurodiversity in Relation: an artistic intraethnography with Estée Klar at York University in Toronto, Canada, where he lives.

Lauren Russell is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020) and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and her work has appeared in various publications, including the The New York Times Magazine and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She was assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh from 2014 to 2016. In the fall of 2020, she joined the faculty of Michigan State University as an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and director of the RCAH Center for Poetry.

Farid Matuk teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010) and The Real Horse (University of Arizona Press, 2018). His work has been supported with grants and residencies from UC Berkeley, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. Matuk’s book-arts collaboration with Colombian artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is forthcoming in 2021 from Singing Saw Press.