THURSDAY, JANUARY 27, 7:30 p.m.
POETRY READING at Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts
ALEXANDRA TEAGUE, KEITH EKISS, and TIFFANY HIGGINS
Three Bay Area poets read from their debut collections—Alexandra Teague, Mortal Geography (Persea Books, 2010), Keith Ekiss, Pima Road Notebook (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2010), and Tiffany Higgins, and Aeneas stares into her helmet (Carolina Wren Press, 2009).
Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts
2904 College Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94705
510-704-8222
Mortal Geography, Alexandra Teague’s debut collection, is winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. These dexterous poems magically reveal the landscape of our emotional geography, unfolding like roadmaps of the human experience. Like its pleasures, the heartaches of this exciting first collection are tenderly rendered: Alexandra Teague is a master of using poetry’s formal capabilities to convey what we most deeply feel. Alexandra Teague has published poems in the Iowa Review, Missouri Review, Paris Review, Slate, as well as in Best American Poetry 2009, Best New Poets 2008, and the forthcoming Yale Anthology of Younger Poets. She lives in Oakland.
“Pima Road Notebook, Keith Ekiss’s remarkable first collection, contrasts the finite imagination of the American dream with enduring serenity and mystery of the Sonoran Desert, where the ridiculous—fairways and greens—compete with the sublime—saguaros and palo verdes. No one has written poems with such a dispassionate and calm eye about the Cadillac desert as Ekiss. Free of sentiment and dream trance, Ekiss is a fair witness to one of American’s most sundered lands.” —Michael Collier
Keith Ekiss is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and the past recipient of scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf and Squaw Valley Writers’ Conferences, Santa Few Art Institute, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Petrified Forest National Park. He lives in San Francisco.
Tiffany Higgins’ first book of poetry, and Aeneas stares into her helmet, is winner of the 2008 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Contest. From Evie Shockley, contest judge: “Aeneas won me over with its intelligence, wit, and unpredictability. I loved the depth and breadth of the poet’s allusions: wars throughout history—from the Trojan War to the ‘War on Terror’ and the Iraq War—are invoked through literary allusions to Virgil, Whitman, and the Bible, as well as pop culture references to phenomena like the Beatles and reality TV.” Tiffany Higgins’ poems have been published in Big Bridge, the Kenyon Review, and other journals. Her critical essays on the work of Mahmoud Darwish and Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail have appeared in the Poetry Flash. She has translated poems of the Lebanese writer Nadia Tuéni, from the French, published in nocturnes. She teaches English in the San Francisco Bay Area.