Visiting Writer Series

The Ragan Poetry Contest was established in 1995 through a generous gift from Dr. James Ragan, a 1966 graduate of Saint Vincent College, who was the Director of the University of Southern California’s Graduate Professional Writing Program. The $250.00 cash award honors Dr. Ragan’s parents, John and Theresa Ragan, and is intended to encourage interest in poetry among Saint Vincent students.

2014 Contest

Our 2014 Ragan Poetry Contest judge was Karen Dietrich. Dietrich grew up in the 1980s in a small factory town 57 miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her first full-length book, THE GIRL FACTORY: A MEMOIR, (skirt/Globe Pequot) was published Oct. 1, 2013. She is the author of three chapbooks from small presses: Understory (dancing girl press, 2013), Girl Years (Matter Press, 2012) and Anchor Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2011).

Dietrich lives in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She is an adjunct writing instructor at Westmoreland County Community College and the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She recently joined the faculty of the online creative writing MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

Congratulations to our 2014 Ragan Poetry Contest Winners! 

• First Place: Chloe Wertz, “raise windows head home”
• Second Place: Kathryn Ordiway, “Suppresible” 
• Third Place: Tyler Friend, “The Printed Girl”

2013 Contest

Our 2013 Ragan Poetry Contest judge was Carmen Giménez Smith. Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010), three poetry collections—Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012), The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) and Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009)—and three poetry chapbooks—Reason’s Monsters (Dusie Kollectiv, 2011), Can We Talk Here (Belladonna Books, 2011) and Glitch (Dusie Kollectiv, 2009). She has also co-edited a fiction anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (Penguin, 2010). 

She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University and Ashland University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press. She lives with her husband, the writer Evan Lavender-Smith, and their two children in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Links:

A poem, “Dèjá Vu,” found on the Poetry Foundation

Listen to Giménez Smith read a poem, “The Day Disco Died,” on NPR 

Congratulations to our 2013 Ragan Poetry Contest Winners! 

• First Place: Kaitlyn Hlebechuk, “Wanting to Level the Scales”
• Second Place: Brittany Banks, “Hail Holy Ovary” 
• Third Place: Josh Flynn, “This Painting is about Falling In Love”

2012 Contest

Our 2012 Ragan Poetry Contest judge was Kevin Pilkington. Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). His poetry has appeared in many anthologies including: Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind and Contemporary Poetry of New England. 

His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including: Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, North American Review and others. A novel entitled Summer Shares is just out from Arche Books.

Links:

Selected Poetry from Valparaiso Poetry Review

A poem posted on the Verse Daily 

Congratulations to our 2012 Ragan Poetry Contest Winners! 

• First Place: Angela Delfine, “You Live”
• Second Place: Angela Gartner, “Red Stained Horse”
• Third Place: Tucker Perkins, “Bacon”

2011 Contest

In 2011, Joy Katz served as the judge. Katz is the author of The Garden Room (Tupelo Press) and Fabulae (Southern Illinois University Press). She holds a B.S. in industrial design from The Ohio State University and an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. Her awards include a 2011 NEA fellowship, a Stegner fellowship and the Nadya Aisenberg fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. 

Her work is anthologized in The Best American Poetry; recent poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and at Chatham University and lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and young son.

LINKS:

Selected Poetry from The Garden Room

An Interview with Joy

Essay on Robert Hass’s “The Nineteenth Century as a Song”

Congratulations to our 2011 Ragan Poetry Contest Winners! 

• First Place: Jeremy Flynn, “On Trumpets, or Jazz”
• Second Place: Sara Eidemiller, “Plums”
• Third Place: Brittany Banks, “Smoke”
• Honorable Mention: Kaitlyn Hlebechuk, “Market Me”

2010 Contest

In 2010, the contest was judged by Sarah O’Brien. A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Brien grew up on a small farm in Ohio and has lived in Cape Town, Paris, and various places in the United States. She is the translator of Ryoko Sekiguchi’s Heliotropes, and her book Catch Light was selected by David Shapiro for the National Poetry Series. But not only is she a writer, she is also a fabulous cook and photographer

Read Her Work

Visit Her Bakeshop 

Congratulations to our 2010 Ragan Poetry Contest Winners! 

• First Place: Zach Tackett, “A Small, Monumental Bead”
• Second Place: Megan Matich, “Catgut”
• Third Place: Grettelyn Nypaver, “Cave-In”
• Honorable Mention: Jillian Janflone, “Find It”

Sarah O'Brien writes of Tackett's Poem:

Both small & monumental

 “Make it new!” Ezra Pound exclaimed, and every student of poetry ever since (and long before for that matter) has been trying to do just that. It sounds easy. It isn’t. Only the good poets make it seem exceedingly simple. In “A small, monumental bead,” Zach Tackett seems to effortlessly guide us into his written world for a closer look. 

As soon as I started to read this poem, I was taken in. I wanted to know where I was, suddenly surrounded by such sensuous description. The inside of a plant? The rough edge of a limb? Did I even care? Admittedly not really – I am happiest when a poem’s language is the first thing that intrigues. No phoneme here is left unconsidered, and the pull between such duos as small and monumental, blood and bone, amalgamate and whirlpools, and ash and collapse kept me returning for the reverberations. 

Tackett knows the distance a little alliterative tension can take us toward feeling the poem from the inside, toward really getting into its skin. “A small, monumental bead” is about showing the world to be as strange and wonderful as it really is, about taking what might normally seem familiar and holding up to the glare. Is it really so usual? Is there really nothing to remark? No, resolutely no. In Tackett’s poem we are “surrounded in an ocean,” where “shadows are hooked / by accident.” This is a world I’d like to stay in. I can’t wait to see what else Tackett writes.

Ligonier Valley Writers

The Ligonier Valley Writers is a nonprofit group serving writers and readers throughout western Pennsylvania.

City of Asylum/Pittsburgh

City of Asylum/Pittsburgh creates a thriving community for writers, readers and neighbors. We provide sanctuary to endangered literary writers, so that they can continue to write and their voices are not silenced. We offer a broad range of literary programs in a variety of community settings to encourage cross-cultural exchange. We anchor neighborhood economic development by transforming blighted properties into homes for these programs and energizing public spaces through public art with text-based components.

Many of our international writers are affiliated with this organization and write for the organization’s magazine, Sampsonia Way.

Generation Magazine

Generation Magazine is Saint Vincent College’s student literary magazine. It is produced every fall by students taking a course in magazine production.

Andy Stallings & Dan Rosenberg

March 12, 2015, 5:30 p.m.
Luparello Lecture Hall, Sis and Herman Dupre Science Pavilion

Andy Stallings lives in Massachusetts, where he is faculty at Deerfield Academy. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an editor of THERMOS magazine, he is married to poet Melissa Dickey. They have three young children: Esme, Curran, and Galen. To the Heart of the World (Rescue Press, 2014) is his first book of poems.

Dan Rosenberg is the author of i (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015). His work has won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. Rosenberg earned an MAF from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from the University of Georgia. He teaches literature and creative writing at Wells College and co-edits Transom.

Karen Rigby

March 16, 2015, 5:30 p.m., Fred M. Rogers Center

Karen Rigby was born in 1979 in Panama City, Panama. She is the author of Chinoiserie (2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, Ahsahta Press, 2012), which was named one of the best books of 2012 by The Volta in its Friday Feature and described as “a poignant, powerful and urgent debut” by Booklist. 

Awarded a 2007 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and a Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council artist opportunity grant, she has been published in Poetry Daily, Black Warrior Review, Washington Square,  Field and New England Review. Her poetry is anthologized in The Arcadia Project, among others.

Rigby is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews have appeared in magazines such as High Country News, ForeWord Reviews, Kirkus Reviews, Bookbrowse, Publishers Weekly and The Writer. She recently served as a poetry reader for the National Endowment for the Arts, and writes in Arizona.

Wendy Miles

March 30, 2015, 5:30 p.m.
Fred M. Rogers Center

Wendy Miles is the winner of the 2014 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award judged by poet Yona Harvey and finalist for the 2013 Perugia Press Prize, has published multi-genre work in places such as Arts & Letters, Tupelo Quarterly, and more. She lives in Lynchburg, Virginia and teaches creative writing at Lynchburg College and Randolph College.

Joseph Massey

April 13, 2015, 5:30 p.m.
Fred M. Rogers Center

Joseph Massey was born and raised outside of Philadelphia. He describes his work by saying: My work is not only a dialogue with the environment and how one registers it, it intimately banters with these influences.

Today, Massey lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts and is the author of To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2015), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), and Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), as well as a dozen chapbooks. His work has also appeared in various journals and magazines, including The Nation, American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West; and in the anthologies Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013) and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015).

Ossian Foley & Caryl Pagel   

Sept. 29, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Fred M. Rogers Center

Ossian Foley is a poet and man of the sea. Of: Vol. I was published in 2013 by Ugly Duckling Presse. With Jim Longley, Ossian edits LVNG Magazine. Ossian lives in Cleveland with his dog, Satchel.

Caryl Pagel is the author of Twice Told (H_NG M_N Books, 2014) and Experiments I Should Like Tried At My Own Death (Factory Hollow Press, 2012). She is the co-founder and editor of Rescue Press, a poetry editor at jubilat, and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.

Ellen Smith    

April 3, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Fred M. Rogers Center

Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron, Bayou, Quiddity, Now Culture, Sententia, The American Poetry Review, Cerise, The Same, Kestrel, Oranges & Sardines, Diner, 5 a.m., Oxford Magazine, The Prose Poem, Southern Poetry Review, Descant (Canada) and others. Flash fiction published or forthcoming in Kestrel, Weave, Switchback, Thickjam, Thumbnail, The Shadyside Review, Wordgathering and Atticus Review.

Her work has been recognized with an AROHO Orlando Prize, an Academy of American Poets award, a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine, and a 2007 Individual Artist grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her chapbook, Scatter, Feed, will be published in the spring of 2014 by Seven Kitchens Press. She is an alumna of Seton Hill University. 

 Senior Sara Campbell read works from her senior project before Ellen’s reading.

 Karen Dietrich    

March 25, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Fred M. Rogers Center

Karen Dietrich grew up in the 1980s in a small factory town fifty-seven miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Her first full-length book, The Girl Factory: A Memoir, (skirt/Globe Pequot) was published in 2013. She is also the author of three chapbooks: Understory (dancing girl press, 2013), Girl Years (Matter Press, 2012) and Anchor Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2011).

Dietrich lives in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She teaches writing at Westmoreland County Community College and the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She recently joined the faculty of the online creative writing MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

Carmen Giménez Smith 

March 26, 2013, 7 p.m., Sis and Herman Dupré Science Pavilion

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010), three poetry collections—Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012), The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) and Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009)—and three poetry chapbooks—Reason’s Monsters (Dusie Kollectiv, 2011), Can We Talk Here (Belladonna Books, 2011) and Glitch (Dusie Kollectiv, 2009). 

She has also co-edited a fiction anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (Penguin, 2010). She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University and Ashland University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press. 

She lives with her husband, the writer Evan Lavender-Smith, and their two children in Las Cruces, New Mexico. (http://carmengimenezsmith.com)

Listen to a Podcast of the Reading 

Eduardo Chirinos & Gary Racz   

Oct. 22, 2012

Eduardo Chirinos, an internationally acclaimed voice of Latin American letters, is professor of Modern and Classic Languages and Literatures at the University of Montana. A member of Peru’s 80’s Generation, which came of age after a decade of military dictatorship, Chirinos won the Premio Casa de América in 2001 for his volume Breve historia de la música [A Brief History of Music] and the Premio Generación del 27 in 2009 for Mientras el lobo está [While the Wolf is Around].

Gary Racz, the translator of Eduardo Chirinos, is an associate professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at Long Island University and at Rutgers University (the latter only during the summer). He presently serves as President of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and as a book review editor for Translation Review. A specialist in poetry translation, Racz has published many poems by Spanish and Latin American writers including Chirinos’ most recent publication, The Smoke of Distant Fires.

Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading 

Kevin Pilkington   

March 26, 2012

The 2012 Ragan Poetry Contest judge was Kevin Pilkington. Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). 

His poetry has appeared in many anthologies including: Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind and Contemporary Poetry of New England. His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including: Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, North American Review and others. A novel entitled Summer Shares is just out from Arche Books.

The winners of the 2012 Ragan Poetry Contest also read their work at the reading.

Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading  

Horacio Castellanos Moya   

Oct. 20, 2011

Born in Honduras and raised in El Salvador, Horacio Castellanos Moya is the author of ten novels. He worked twelve years as a journalist in Mexico and has lived in Costa Rica, Canada, Guatemala, Spain and Germany (the latest under the auspices of the Frankfurt International Book Fair). 

 He became famous in 1997 with the publication of his novel El asco [“Revulsion”], because of which he was forced into exile. In 2007, he came to the United States as writer-in-residence of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, and he now teaches on the permanent faculty of The University of Iowa. His work has been translated into a dozen languages; four works have been translated into English, his most recent being Tyrant Memory.

LINKS:

An Article in the Pittsburgh City Paper about Senselessness

Interview with City of Literature

Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading  

Joy Katz   

April 11, 2011

On Monday, April 11, 2011, the poet Joy Katz gave a reading with the Ragan Poets to packed room in the Fred Rogers Center. Interacting with her audience, Katz gave powerful insight into her writing style as well and answered questions from the audience while she read from her book The Garden Room as well as new poems. Katz also served as judge for the 2011 Ragan Contest.

The picture below is from the reading. Many thanks to Maryann G. Eidemiller who provided us with some great photos of the event.  

Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading  

Khet Mar   

Oct. 1, 2010

Every fall, the Saint Vincent College Reading Series brings a distinguished writer to campus for a short visit. In 2010, Khet Mar, a native of Burma, was the Writer-in-Residence.

Khet Mar was born in 1969. She is a journalist, novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Author of one novel, Wild Snowy Night, as well as several collections of short stories, essays and poems, her work has been translated into English and Japanese, been broadcast on radio and made into a film. In the fall of 2007, Mar was a visiting fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and she is currently in residence at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, which provides sanctuary to writers exiled under threat of death, imprisonment or persecution in their native countries (Pen World Voices).

Her reading took place in the Fred Rogers Center at 7 p.m. on Oct. 21. Our events are free and open to the public.

Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading

View an Informational Video on Burma 

Sarah O'Brien   

April 23, 2010

Every spring, the Saint Vincent College Reading Series invites a poet to judge the annual Ragan Poetry Contest and come to campus for a reading.

This year’s judge was Sarah O’Brien. A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Brien grew up on a small farm in Ohio and has lived in Cape Town, Paris and various places in the United States. She is the translator of Ryoko Sekiguchi’s Heliotropes, and her book Catch Light was selected by David Shapiro for the National Poetry Series. But not only is she a writer, she is also a fabulous cook and photographer.

O'Brien read poems from Catch Light. With her visual narrative, O’Brien threw us into pictures, catching our eyes and ears and allowing us to become part of her story.

Listen to a Podcast of the Reading 

José Kozer   

Sept. 24, 2009

José Kozer is the preeminent Cuban poet of his generation and one of the most influential poets in Latin America, where his name is a household word among readers of poetry. He has published 51 books of poetry and two books of prose, and his work has been published in Mexico, Spain, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Chile. Dozens of articles and several books have been written about his work. He has been translated into English, German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, Italian and French.

“It’s the humanity of the writing (passionate and comic by turns, and always precisely referential) that predicts its lasting greatness,” wrote poet and critic Jerome Rothenberg. “A resident of America and of the world, José Kozer is a poet who works at full throttle, gives us thereby what poetry has never done before and what it has always done.”

Kozer was the first living Cuban Diaspora poet to have a book published in Cuba. He was born in Cuba in 1940, the son of Jewish parents who migrated in the late 1920s from Poland and Czechoslovakia. He left Cuba in 1960 and lived in New York until 1997 where he was a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature and taught at Queens College for 32 years. Upon retiring, he moved to Spain and then to Florida, where he now resides.

Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading

A Conversation with Cuban Poet Jose Kozer 

Alex Lemon   

Spring 2009

Alex Lemon is the author of Happy: A Memoir (Scribner), the poetry collections Mosquito (Tin House Books), Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions), Fancy Beasts (Milkweed Editions) and the chapbook At Last Unfolding Congo (horse less press). His writing has appeared in Esquire, Best American Poetry 2008, AGNI, BOMB, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Open City, Pleiades and Tin House, among others. 

He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He co-edits LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation with Ray Gonzalez and frequently writes book reviews. A native of Iowa, Lemon lives in Fort Worth, Texas and teaches at Texas Christian University. (AlexLemon.com, Simon & Schuster)

Rick Hilles   

Fall 2008

Rick Hilles, acclaimed poet and assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt, was named one of 10 recipients of the 2008 Whiting Writer’s Awards given for “writers of exceptional talent and promise in early career.” Author of the award-winning poetry collection Brother Salvage, Hilles received a $50,000 prize from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, based in New York.

Brother Salvage won the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press) and was named the 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord magazine. Hilles has been an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and the Ruth and Jay C. Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also received the Larry Levis Editor’s Prize in Poetry from the Missouri Review. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Salmagundi and Witness. (Vanderbilt Magazine)

Nancy Reisman   

Fall 2008

Nancy Reisman is the author of House Fires, a short story collection that won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award as well as The First Desire, a novel set in her hometown of Buffalo, NY. Her work has appeared in, among other anthologies and journals, Best American Short Stories2001, Tin House, Glimmer Train and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her story “Tea” was included in the anthology The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005.

House Fires won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture awarded The First Desire the 2005 Samuel Goldberg Jewish Fiction Award in June. The New York Times named The First Desire as a notable book of 2004.

Reisman, a native of Buffalo, N.Y., earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has taught at the University of Michigan, and she currently teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. (Random House, Vanderbilt University)

Ben Lerner

Spring 2008

Ben Lerner, author of three collections of poetry, has been called by Publishers Weekly “among the most promising young poets now writing.” His debut volume, The Lichtenberg Figures (Copper Canyon), was selected from more than 1000 manuscripts to win the 2003 Hayden Carruth Award; it was also named to the “Best Poetry Books of the Year” list by Library Journal and praised by The New York Times as a “funny, nervy volume.” His second book, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon), was a finalist for the National Book Award. It will appear in German translation from Luxbooks in the late spring of 2010. Copper Canyon published his third book, Mean Free Path, in early 2010.

Originally from Topeka, Kansas, Lerner holds a B.A. in Political Theory and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Spain in 2003-2004. While at Brown he co-founded No: a journal of the arts, and his own poetry can be found in a variety of magazines, including Fence, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Slate and Verse, as well as in the anthologies: The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribners), The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry (Green Integer), New Voices (Northern Ireland, Irish Pages), and 12×12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa). He edits poetry for Critical Quarterly. Lerner has taught at the California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and joined the faculty of the MFA Program at Brooklyn College in 2010. (Copper Canyon Press, Brooklyn College)