A Reading for Matt Henriksen

Dot Devota writes poems and essays about pre-sickness, sensations in the phenomenon of “falling ill,” and post-viral, chronic and mysterious illness in individual, societal, and environmental body-scapes. Her books include PMS: A Journal In Verse and The Division of Labor (Rescue Press), And The Girls Worried Terribly (Noemi Press), The Eternal Wall (Cannibal Books, re-issued by Book*hug), and Dept. of Posthumous Letters (Argos Books). Excerpts from her nonfiction novel, MW: A Field Guide to the Midwest, are published in PEN America, and Denver Quarterly, among other places. >SHE is her recent prose manuscript that the author dubs autoimmunefiction. Devota’s Wall Poems are large-scale calligraphic installations which have exhibited nationally at museums and galleries.

A writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in northern California. His books, often concerned with ecology, include Be With (New Directions 2018) winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, the novel The Trace (New Directions 2014), and Twice Alive, (New Directions, 2021). Gander’s translations and co-translations include Alice Iris Red Horse by Gozo Yoshimasu (New Directions 2016), Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura (Omnidawn 2011), and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems (Copper Canyon Press 2016) He has received grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting and United States Artists Foundations.

Writer Mathias Svalina is the author of five books, most recently The Wine-Dark Sea from Sidebrow books. In 2020, Civil Coping Mechanisms will publish The Depression, a collection of fables & photographs he wrote with the photographer Jon Pack. He is a founding editor of the small press Octopus books and runs a dream delivery service (dreamdeliveryservice.com).

Poet, critic, and educator Amish Trivedi is from Stone Mountain, GA. He is the author of FuturePanic (co•im•press, 2021), Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed (Shearsman, 2019), and Sound/Chest (Coven, 2015). He has an M.F.A. from Brown University’s Program in Literary Arts and a Ph.D. in English and Critical Theory from Illinois State University. He is currently a post doctoral researcher at the University of Delaware.

Poet Dustin Williamson is the publisher of Rust Buckle Books. He is the author of a number of chapbooks, including Obstructed View (Salacious Banter) and Cab Ass’n (Lame House).

Anselm Berrigan is the poetry editor for the Brooklyn Rail, and author of a number of books of poems, most recently Pregrets, from Black Square Editions.

Poet Charles Valle was born in Manila, Philippines and immigrated to California when he was seven years old. Since 2006, he has served as one of the Poetry Editors at FENCE Magazine, and his work has been featured in numerous publications including Denver Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. Valle lives in Portland, Oregon where he is a Change Management Director for Nike. His first book of poetry, Proof of Stake, was published by Fonograf Editions in June 2021.