Friday, September 24, 2010,
7:00 – 8:30 PM
Henry Auditorium
Free

In tandem with the conference Convergence Zones: Public Cultures and Translocal Practices, sponsored by the UW and Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, five writers read their innovative work.

Jeanne Heuving recently published Transducer (Chax), preceded by Incapacity (Chiasmus), which received a 2004 Book of the Year from Small Press Traffic. She is a professor in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell and on the graduate faculty in English at UW Seattle. She has published multiple critical works on innovative and avant garde writing and is currently finishing work on a manuscript, The Transmutation of Love in Twentieth Century Poetry.

Hank Lazer has published fifteen books of poetry, most recently Portions (Lavender Ink), The New Spirit (Singing Horse), Elegies & Vacations (Salt), and Days (Lavender Ink). He edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. For the past four years, he has been working on a handwritten shape-writing project called the Notebooks (of Being & Time). Lazer is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and the Executive Director of the Creative Campus initiative at the University of Alabama.

Robert Mittenthal is author of Value Unmapped (Nomados), Martyr Economy, Ready Terms (Tsunami Editions), and the forthcoming Wax World (Chax). Irrational Dude, a chapbook of collaborative work with Nico Vassilakis, was published last year by tir aux pigeons. Mittenthal was instrumental in creating and curating the Subtext Reading Series in Seattle. For Mittenthal’s blog, see http://rmutts.blogspot.com.

A native of Southern California, Lou Rowan began his writing career in New York City, during the heyday of experimentation circulating through St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. He currently lives and writes in Seattle, where he edits Golden Handcuffs Review. His two recent books are the novel My Last Days (Chiasmus) and a story-collection Sweet Potatoes (Ahadada Books).

Zhang Er, born in Beijing, is the author of four collections of poetry in Chinese, most recently Yellow Walls: A String of Doors. She has six chapbooks of her work translated into English, among them, Carved Water (Tinfish) and Sight Progress (Pleasure Boat Studio). Her selected poems occur within two bilingual collections, So Translating Rivers and Cities (Zephyr) and Verses on Bird (Zephyr). She co-edited the bilingual volume Another Kind of Nation: an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Talisman). She teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.