Full program: Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange: April 6, 2017
Video clips: Melissa Eleftherion | Trevor Calvert | Carrie Hunter | Aja Couchois Duncan | Maw Shein Win
A celebratory reading by contributors to our Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange, a space for poets to convene, correspond, and collaborate via the currency of the poetry community: chapbooks. Created and developed by Melissa Eleftherion and Elise Ficarra for the Poetry Center at SF State University, the PCCE is a community-curated archive that uses the “each one invites one” model. This cooperative model has facilitated the compilation of a diverse and richly innovative collection of poetry chapbooks for public access.
This reading, organized by Melissa Eleftherion and Elise Ficarra, features Bay Area poets Melissa Eleftherion, Trevor Calvert, Carrie Hunter, Aja Couchois Duncan, and Maw Shein Win.
Melissa Eleftherion grew up in Brooklyn. She is the author of five chapbooks including huminsect, and Pigtail Duty. Her first full-length collection, field guide to autobiography, is due out this spring from H_NGM_N. Melissa now lives in Mendocino County where she works as a Teen Librarian, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series at the Ukiah Library. She is, with Elise Ficarra, founding editor of Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange.
Trevor Calvert grew up in the woods of Northern California but has spent the last seventeen years in the East Bay as a poet and librarian. He's the author of North Gives Flesh to Wind (Little Red Leaves) and Rarer & More Wonderful (Scrambler Books) and is the editor of Spooky Actions Books.
Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, edits the chapbook press, ypolita press, and is on the editorial board of Black Radish Books. Her chapbook Vice/Versa recently came out with Dancing Girl Press; her full-length collection, The Incompossible, was published in 2011 by Black Radish Books; and another collection, Orphan Machines, appeared in 2015. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.
Lush with elemental imagery, Aja Couchois Duncan is a mixed Scottish, French and Ojibwe North American who speaks elegiac, celebratory, and melancholic histories human and geological. (Note this is actually a review of my book [Restless Continent, newly published by Litmus Press], but I prefer to embody this narrative landscape myself.)
Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and works in the Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in various journals, including Cimarron Review, Fanzine, Eleven Eleven, the Fabulist, and the anthology Cross-Strokes: Poetry Between Los Angeles and San Francisco (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions). She is a poetry editor for Rivet: The Journal of Writing that Risks and a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Her most recent poetry chapbook Score and Bone (Nomadic Press) was nominated for a CLMP Firecracker Award. She is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito.