Friday, April 11th (7:00PM)

PORTNEUF VALLEY BREWING CO.

Host: Bethany Schultz Hurst
Readers: Paisley Rekdal and Ely Shipley

Note: Lecture is at 3:00pm in the Rendezvous Center Rm. 111

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, October 2000 and Vintage Books, April 2002), and three books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, October 2000), Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, November 2002) and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (University of Pittsburgh Press/Pitt Poetry Series, April 2007). Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, the University of Georgia Press' Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, several Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, NPR, Nerve, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Quarterly West, among others.

Ely Shipley's first book of poems, Boy with Flowers, won the 2007 Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips, and will be published in the spring of 2008. He also won the Utah Writer's Award in Poetry from the Western Humanities Review judged by Edward Hirsch and the Virginia Faulkner Award from Prairie Schooner. He was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets' Levis prize judged by Susan Howe in 2007 and the James Hearst Award from the North American Review judged by Li-Young Lee in 2003. His poems appear in Willow Springs, Florida Review, Phoebe, The Greensboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, Diagram, Barrow Street, Third Coast, LTTR, and Bloom. He has taught creative writing, literature, and gender Studies at Purdue University and the University of Utah, and frequently facilitates workshops with LGBTQ youth. He currently lives in Salt Lake City, where he is a PhD candidate in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah.

This reading is sponsored by the Idaho Humanities Council.