prose poems

William Matthews reads poems from his collection Sleek for the Long Flight (1972). He also reads newer poems that would appear in Sticks & Stones (1975) and Rising and Falling (1979), together with several poems that would remain uncollected.

Leslie Scalapino reads work appearing in The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion (1997) and Way (1988).

Ira Sadoff reads from his collections Alcools (1964), Settling Down (1975), Palm Reading in Winter (1978), A Northern Calendar (1982), and Emotional Traffic (1989) in addition to one uncollected poem in translation. 

Jimmy Santiago Baca reads poems and prose from his body of work, including A Glass of Water (2009), A Place to Stand (2002), Healing Earthquakes (2001), Martín & Meditations on the South Valley (1987), and C-Train (Dream Boy's Story) and Thirteen Mexicans: Poems (2002).

Aurelie Sheehan reads from Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories (2013). This reading was originally given with Farid Matuk.

Laynie Browne reads poetry from her collections Lost Parkour Ps(alms) (2014), Practice (2015), and Scorpyn Odes (2015), as well as uncollected work. 

Sawako Nakayasu mixes her poetry and her translations, crafting a reading that she describes as a translation of the innovative form of her book Mouth: Eats Color (2011). She reads her own poems from The Ants (2014) and Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From (2020), a manuscript in progress that would be published two years after this reading. She also reads translations of poems by Japanese modernist Chika Sagawa from Mouth: Eats Color and Korean modernist Yi Sang, later published in Yi Sang: Selected Works (2020). 

Kiki Petrosino reads poems from Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), Witch Wife (2017), and Black Genealogy (2017).

Los Angeles poet Sesshu Foster reads from City Terrace Field Manual (1996), World Ball Notebook (2008), and City of the Future (2018). He reads poems that engage with East LA, the influences of his father, and his own life as a father, mixing candor and humor throughout.

Yanyi reads from his two published collections, The Year of Blue Water (2019) and Dream of the Divided Field (2022), opening with two early, uncollected poems and closing with one recent draft. Intimacy emerges as a thematic center—in friendships, romantic relationships, and with the self.

Sawako Nakayasu reads work stemming from her 2017 return to the United States from Japan and the challenges of being immersed again in the violence of American culture. She opens with several new ant poems before reading from Say Translation Is Art (2020), Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From (2020), Pink Waves (2023), and her forthcoming book Settle Her. This reading was presented in collaboration with the American Literary Translators Association and as part of the ALTA46 conference.