TWO WAYS TO EXPERIENCE:
Drop a note here and we will send you the ZOOM link
OR
watch LIVE on the Writers Guild at Bloomington page
WEDNESDAY, JULY 1
6pm EST
featuring poets Erik Fuhrer, Jeffrey Bean, Jennifer Payne
with music by ORTET x Urban Deer
Sponsored in part by the Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, and the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association – Indiana
ERIK FUHRER is a poet, artist, collaborator, and educator. With his wife, the painter Kimberly Androlowicz, he is co-collaborator of not human enough for the census (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019) and in which I take myself hostage (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming 2020). Erik is the author of 3 additional poetry collections, all of which leverage poetic erasure: every time you die (Alien Buddha Press, 2019), which includes art by Marcel Herms,VOS (Yavanika Press, 2019), which includes redacted digital collages by the author, and At Root (Alien Buddha Press, 2020), which includes digital art by the author. His work has been a finalist for Survision’s Inaugural James Tate Chapbook Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net. Erik received his MFA from the University of Notre Dame. He is currently an editorial assistant for International Studies in Literature and the Environment [ISLE] and a reader for Pidgeonholes. He has taught literature, writing and rhetoric, and creative writing at the University of Notre Dame, St. John’s University, Suffolk County Community College, and The College of New Rochelle. He has also worked at two Centers for Teaching: Notre Dame’s Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning and the University of Iowa’s Center for Teaching, where he served as assistant director and regularly consulted with faculty and graduate students on various teaching topics, including teaching philosophies. Erik is available for individual consultations on teaching on request.
JEFFREY BEAN was raised in Bloomington, Indiana. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Jazz Guitar Performance from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from the University of Alabama. From 2006-2008, he served as the Axton Fellow in Poetry at the University of Louisville. Currently, he lives with his wife Jessica and daughter Olivia in Mount Pleasant, MI, where he is Professor of English/Creative Writing at Central Michigan University. His first full length collection, Diminished Fifth, was published by David Robert Books in 2009. His chapbook Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window won the 2013 Vern Cowles/Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Southeast Missouri State University Press, and his chapbook The Voyeur’s Litany won the Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest and was published in 2016. His second full-length collection, Woman Putting on Pearls, won the 2016 Red Mountain Poetry Prize and was published by Red Mountain Press. His poems have been featured on the NPR program The Writer’s Almanac and in Garrison Keillor’s anthology Good Poems, American Places. Recent poems appear in the journals FIELD, Slate.com, Southern Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, Subtropics, Smartish Pace, and River Styx, among others.
JENNIFER PAYNE is a multi-disciplinary artist from Bloomington Indiana. She studied Creative Writing at Indiana University and represented IU in the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational in 2017. She has participated in her local slam community for 4 years. Jennifer also makes wire wrapped jewelry and operates a small, local, handmade style shop.
ORTET, a projection of Urban Deer, combine spoken word and ambient field recordings with an improvisational sound bed, exploring the edges of music, culture, and location. Featuring Marty Belcher (saxes), Tony Brewer (foley), Norbert Herber (fx) Chris Rall (turntablism + sax), Joe MF Stone (drums + mixage)