Join us for a reading with poets Hoa Nguyen, Dale Martin Smith, and Julie Choffel (below, left to right).

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, Texas, their home of fourteen years. She is the author of nine books and chapbooks including As Long As Trees Last (Wave, 2012) and Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008 (Wave, 2014). She currently lives in Toronto, where she curates a reading series, reads tarot, and teaches poetic.

On the faculty of the Department of English at Ryerson University, Toronto, Dale Smith has published five books of poetry and a critical monograph, including, most recently, Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform, 2014), a book of narrative writing. He is the author of poetry that investigates the historical and domestic experiences of American culture in four other works: American Rambler (2002), The Flood & the Garden (2002), Black Stone (2008), and Susquehanna (2009). Additional writing can be found in anthologies and cultural journals like The Baffler, Best American Poetry, Exquisite Corpse, Mandorla, and the Poetry Foundation website. More recently, his provocative arguments on the concept of Slow Poetry have been discussed in The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and at other locations of literary and cultural debate; an essay on North American public culture and poetics appears in a new collection, Toward. Some. Air: Remarks on Poetics (Banff Centre Press, 2014).

A native Austinite, Julie Choffel is the author of The Hello Delay (Fordham UP, 2012), winner of the Poets Out Loud prize. She is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Connecticut.