Poetry reading at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, May 23

Poets Alice Osborn, Luke Hankins, Katherine Soniat and Eric Ekstrand all present work around the theme of The South. The evening of poetry takes place at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center on  Saturday, May 23 at 8 p.m.

Press release from BMCM+AC:

The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in downtown Asheville presents an evening of poetry on Saturday, May 23rd at 8:00pm. Invited poets Alice Osborn, Luke Hankins, Katherine Soniat and Eric Ekstrand will consider The South as place, muse, hero and villain. The evening is organized by Asheville-based writer/educator Eric Steineger.
Admission is $5 for BMCM+AC members & students + ID / $8 for non-members

Invited Poets:
Alice Osborn’s past educational and work experience is unusually varied, and it now feeds her work as a poet, editor, and author mentor. Alice is the author of three books of poetry and is the proud editor of the Main Street Rag anthologies Tattoos and Creatures of Habitat. www.aliceosborn.com.

Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets(both from Wipf & Stock). A graduate of the Indiana University M.F.A. in Creative Writing program, where he held the Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry, Hankins is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives. Hankins also serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including 32 Poems, American Literary Review, The Collagist,Contemporary Poetry Review, Image, New England Review, Poetry East, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Chronicle.

Katherine Soniat’s seventh collection, Bright Stranger, is forthcoming from LSU Press, spring 2016. The Swing Girl  was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. A chapbook, The Goodbye Animals, recently received the Turtle Island Quarterly Award. A Shared Life received The Iowa Poetry. She teaches in the Great Smokies Writers Program. www.katherinesoniat.com .

Eric Ekstrand lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his husband, Danny, and his father, Ken. He teaches writing at Wake Forest University. He is the recipient of a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship awarded by The Poetry Foundation and graduated from the University of Houston with an MFA in Creative Writing in 2010. He is a former poetry editor of Gulf Coast:A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Poetry, jubilat, Indiana Review, Black Warrior Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere.  His first full-length collection, Laodicea, was selected by Donald Revell for the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published this April.

This program is presented in conjunction with our current exhibition Poemumbles: 30 years of Susan Weil’s poem/images on display from January 30-May 23, 2015. Susan Weil is a painter, printmaker and book artist living in New York City. She studied at Académie Julian in Paris before enrolling at Black Mountain College in 1948 and then later at the Art Students League in New York. Weil is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work is included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the National Museum, Stockholm; Helsinki City Art Museum; and Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.