The 2024 season of What The Universe Is starts off with a big bang of a reading! This month’s quartet met in grad school at Warren Wilson and reconnected during COVID to support each other’s writing in the present moment. Let their affectionate camaraderie and exquisite poetry set the tone for the year to come!
Subhaga Crystal Bacon (she/they), is the author of four collections of poetry including Transitory, 2023, winner of the BOA Editions, Ltd. Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry; Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize; Blue Hunger, from Methow Press, 2020, and Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, winner of the A. Poulin New Poetry America Prize from BOA Editions in 2004. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she’s a teaching artist working in schools and libraries with youth and adults, as well as private students. Her work appears in a variety of print and online journals including The Diode Poetry Journal, The Bellevue Literary Review, Indianapolis Review, Smartish Pace, and others. A Queer elder, she lives in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land.
Brandel France de Bravo is the author of the forthcoming Locomotive Cathedral (Backwaters Press, University of Nebraska), Provenance, and the chapbook Mother, Loose. Her poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, The Georgia Review, Seneca Review and elsewhere. She teaches a meditation program developed at Stanford University called Compassion Cultivation Training.©
Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens, winner of the 2023 Italian American Studies Association Book Award and selected as a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and My Tarantella, also selected as a “Must Read” and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is the author of the chapbooks All Things are Born to Change Their Shapes, In the Year of Ferraro, and After Bird. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The Tahoma Literary Review, Scoundrel Time, Broadsided Press, Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for MER.
Barbara O’Dair has been writing poetry sporadically since she was seven years old, culminating in an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College’s low-residency creative writing program. There, she befriended the other three readers here today.
After graduation, Barbara lost touch with her pals and more or less shelved poetry to raise her kids and pursue a journalism career—including three times as a magazine editor-in-chief and four times as an executive editor. During COVID she reached out to her Warren Wilson friends with the suggestion they form a writing workshop, which continues to this day. Nevertheless, she considers herself a newbie again.
Barbara was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. She was selected by Thomas Lux to be the winner of Mudfish 9’s annual poetry contest. She has also published in Semiotexte; Wisconsin Review; Alaska Quarterly; Nerve; Feminist Review and Lumina, and in several anthologies, including Shore Stories and All We Know of Pleasure.
She lives with her family in New Jersey.
Registration for this reading is easy and free: bit.ly/WTUIJan2024