Radical Poetry Reading with Micah Ballard

Poet Micah Ballard is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: The Michaux Notebook (FMSBW, 2019), Afterlives (Bootstrap Press, 2016), Waifs and Strays (City Lights Books, 2011), nominated for a California Book Award, and Parish Krewes (Bootstrap Press, 2009), and over a dozen small books, including Selected Prose (2008–19) (Blue Press, 2020), Daily Vigs (Bird & Beckett Books, 2019), Vesper Chimes (Gas Meter, 2014), Evangeline Downs (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006) and Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners (Bootstrap Press, 2017). He is co-editor for Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions.

Ari Banias is the author of A Symmetry, which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, and Anybody, both from W. W. Norton. His work has been supported by numerous fellowships and residencies, and has been published in Triple Canopy, The Nation, The New Republic, Hyperallergic, The Yale Review, and Bæst, among others. Ari lives in Chicago.

Poet Maw Shein Win’s chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 - 2018). Her full-length poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was long listed for the PEN America Open Book Award, nominated for a Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and short listed for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry for 2021. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was a Spring 2021 ARC Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley.

Poet and essayist Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute (Nightboat, 2020). Other works include Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2016), and two books from City Lights: Citizen (2012) and King of Shadows (2008). A pioneer in both LGBTQ+ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. A longtime educator, he’s the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Poet and translator Guillermo Parra’s most recent translations are the novel The Conspiracy (Sampsonia Way, 2014) by the Venezuelan writer Israel Centeno, Air on the Air: Selected Poems of Juan Sánchez Peláez (Black Square Editions, 2015), and José Antonio Ramos Sucre: Selected Works (University of New Orleans Press, 2012), which was included by World Literature Today in its list of 75 Notable Translations 2012. He writes the translation blog Venepoetics and lives in Pittsburgh.