Fifth Wednesday Journal: Michael Anania, Jeffery Renard Allen, and Elise Paschen

Jackie K. White will introduce a reading by Michael Anania, Jeffery Renard Allen, and Elise Paschen, all poets with a strong Chicago connection. The program will include music and a reception. This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from Poets & Writers, Inc. Chicago.

Michael Anania's career as poet, editor, essayist, and novelist has been informed by a deep commitment to modernism. Anania's poetry draws its energies from a wide range of modernist sources; including William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Anania has also shown a strong commitment to modernism and its traditions as an editor with Audit (later Audit/Poetry) from 1962 to 1967, Partisan Review from 1974 to 1975, the Swallow Press from 1967 to 1974, and Tri-Quarterly since 1976. His essays, many of which are collected in In Plain Sight: Obsessions, Morals and Domestic Laughter (1991), include some of the most insightful insider's views of American literary publishing available today.

Jeffery Renard Allen, born and raised in Chicago, is a Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York and an instructor in the Writing Program at The New School. Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and three works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), which won The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction, the book of stories Holding Pattern (Graywolf 2008), which won The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and the forthcoming novel Song of the Shank (Graywolf 2014), which is loosely based on the life of Blind Tom, a nineteenth century African American piano virtuoso and composer. Allen’s awards include a fellowship at The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a grant in Innovative Literature from Creative Capital.

Elise Paschen is the author of Bestiary (Red Hen Press, 2009); Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize; and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The New Republic, The Hudson Review and Ploughshares. Former executive director of the Poetry Society of America, she has edited many anthologies, including Poetry Speaks and Poetry in Motion. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Co-sponsored with Fifth Wednesday Journal