Join us April 15 at 6:30pm as we enjoy a reading and a conversation with debut author, Gabrielle Bates! She will be joined by Rachel Mennies and Ruben Quesada.
Gabrielle Bates is the author of the poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), recently featured in the New York Times and named by the Chicago Review of Books as a must-read book of 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, The Slowdown show, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter: @GabrielleBates.
Rachel Mennies is the author of The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021) and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards (Texas Tech University Press, 2014), winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Her poems and essays have been published at The Believer, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry and reviews editor for AGNI and the series editor, since 2016, of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mennies currently lives in Chicago, where she works as a writer, editor, and adjunct professor.
Ruben Quesada is the editor of a hybrid collection, Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (2022), as well as the author of Jane: La Segua (2023), Revelations (2018), and Next Extinct Mammal: Poems (2011). His writing appears in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kirkus, and Harvard Review. He has received fellowships and grants from Canto Mundo, Lambda Literary Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events at the City of Chicago. He serves on the National Book Critics Circle board and is the 2022 chair for the award in nonfiction. He is an Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University-Los Angeles and for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.
