The Open Door Readings: November

The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hourlong event features readings by two Chicagoland college and graduate writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students. November's Open Door Reading features Lewis University’s Simone Muench and her student C. Russell Price, along with Northwestern University’s Reginald Gibbons and his student Christine Pacyk.

Simone Muench is the author of five books including Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010) and Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). In addition, her chapbook Trace (BLP, 2014) received the Black River Award. Some of her honors include an NEA fellowship, Illinois Arts Council fellowships, the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, the PSA’s Bright Lights/Big Verse Contest, and residency fellowships to Yaddo, Artsmith, and VSC. At Lewis University, she serves as professor of English as well as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Collaborative sonnets, written with Dean Rader, are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Zyzzyva, Blackbird, and others.

C. Russell Price has published in Assaracus, Court Green, North Chicago Review, MiPOesias, Weave, and elsewhere. He holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA from Northwestern University. Price was the first runner-up for the 2013 Edes Prize for Emerging Artists and works with Story Club Magazine and TriQuarterly. You can find him painting and playing piano on Chicago's North Side.

Reginald Gibbons is the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (1997), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize, and Creatures of a Day (2008), finalist for the National Book Award. He has been awarded the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize and the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Gibbons was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997, during which time he co-founded and edited TriQuarterly Books. His first novel, Sweetbitter (1994), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. 

Christine Pacyk is a writer and educator from the Chicago suburbs. She completed her MFA from Northwestern University in 2014. Her poetry has appeared in the Found Poetry Review, Monsters & Dust, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She is currently working on her first novel.