New Issues Reading at Western Michigan University: March 25

The Gwen Frostic Reading Series of Western Michigan University proudly presents the New Issues Press Reading, featuring poets Donald Platt and Malinda Markham.

Thursday, March 25th, 8 p.m.

WMU's Bernhard Center, Rooms 105-107

Malinda Markham is the author of Having Cut the Sparrow's Heart, winner of the 2009 Green Rose Prize. She received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver. After teaching full-time in the Linguistics Department at Daito Bunka University in Tokyo for several years, she won a Blakemore Fellowship to attend Stanford University’s Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan. Her first book of poems, Ninety-five Nights of Listening, won the Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize and was published by Houghton-Mifflin. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, Paris Review, Volt, Fence, and Antioch Review and has been included in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and Deep Travel. She has also published translations of post-war and contemporary Japanese women’s poetry. She lives in New York and works as a Japanese-to-English financial translator.

"In a masterful work of startling possibilities, Markham layers gleaming phrases into a testimony to the world’s particularities, which she reveals as also, paradoxically, eternal. Nothing here is limited by history, but instead attains the kind of simultaneity that drives myth. And like myth, her world is populated by creatures that mean, irreducibly, only themselves. Her ready attention to animals and birds is indicative of a compassion that demands of the world an inventive intelligence, and offers it one in return." —Cole Swensen

Donald Platt is a professor of English at Purdue University. He is the author of Dirt Angles (New Issues, 2009). His first two collections, Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, and Guns and Cloud Atlas, were published by Purdue University Press as winners of the Verna Emery Poetry Prize. His third book, My Father Says Grace, was published by the University of Arkansas Press. He is a recipient of the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Center for Book Arts’ Poetry Chapbook Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in many magazines and journals, including The New Republic, Nation, Paris Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Field, Iowa Review, Southwest Review, and Southern Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2006. He lives with his wife, the poet Dana Roeser, and their two daughters in West Lafayette, Indiana.

"Donald Platt’s aptly titled and arresting fourth collection of poems, Dirt Angels, examines how we exist in states of physical disrepair, decay, and disability: the world’s transience exhibited in the slow degradation of our very consciousness and flesh."—Paisley Rekdal