Chicago Ideas Week: Ken Arkind, Tony Hoagland, J. Patrick Lewis, Agustina Woodgate, and Mary Zimmerman

As part of the newly launched Chicago Ideas Week, several cultural luminaries give 18-minute TED-style talks on themes related to poetry. Ken Arkind is a national poetry slam champion and the executive director of the Denver Minor Disturbance Youth Poetry Project. He has opened for Cloud Cult, Devotchka, The Flobots, Sage Francis Gil Scott Heron, NPR's Amy Goodman, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Tony Hoagland has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Donkey Gospel, What Narcissism Means to Me, and Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. Winner of the Mark Twain Award and the Jackson Prize, he teaches at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. J. Patrick Lewis is the author of more than 50 books of poetry, and was named Children’s Poet Laureate in May 2011. Before retiring in 1998, Lewis taught economics at Otterbein College in Ohio. Agustina Woodgate is a Miami interdisciplinary artist who creates objects, installations, performances, and projects that focus on the interplay between human beings and their surroundings. As part of the 2011 O, Miami Poetry Festival, Woodgate took to poetry bombing: she sewed verse by Sylvia Plath and Li Po into clothes in Miami-area thrift stores. Mary Zimmerman has worked with Lookingglass Theatre Company and the Goodman Theatre, where she has adapted and directed acclaimed versions of The Odyssey, Metamorphoses, and Journey to the West, among other works. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Tony Award, she is professor of performance studies at Northwestern University.