Visiting Writers Series

Kate Colby’s nine books of poetry include “I Mean,” “Dream of the Trenches,” and most recently “Reverse Engineer.” She has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, and the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. Her poems and essays have appeared recently in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Fence, Lana Turner, and The Nation. She lives in Providence, where she teaches and works as a copywriter.

Richard Meier’s most recent book is a selection of poem/essays, “A Duration” (Wave 2023). A related book, “A Companion,” will be published by Wave in spring 2025. These were preceded by four books of poetry: “February March April April” (Oxeye Press, 2017), “In the Pure Block of the Whole Imaginary” (Omnidawn 2012), “Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar” (Wave Books 2006), and “Terrain Vague,” selected by Tomaž Šalamun for the Verse Prize and published by Verse Press in 2001. In recent years, he has practiced and taught workshops on writing and walking and other daily and durational writing practices. He is a professor of English and writer-in-residence at Carthage College. He lives in Somers and Madison, Wis.

“What is the Zetaqop?”
David Abel will present a guided tour through his history of experiments with language, exploring how immaterial pre-occupations can take material form. He will present the results of his frequent collaborations with book artists to make eccentric material and physical realizations of eccentric texts, reading, performing, and showing a selection of unique textual objects. And he will narrate how this life of collaboration and experiment led him intuitively to his career as a bookstore proprietor and collector, distributor, and scholar of artists’ books, small press poetry, and other experiments on paper.

David Abel is a writer, editor, and curator, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Ore. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series, now in its twenty-second year, he was also a cofounder of Thirteen Hats, a collective of Portland writers and artists; a member of the Four Wall Cinema collective; and an inaugural Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art. His recent publications include a chapbook of poems, “Equifinality,” from Crane’s Bill in Albuquerque, N.M.; two books based on verbal performance scores — “XIV Eclipses,” published by Couch Press in Portland, and “Selected Durations,” published by the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada in Reno — and a new edition, published by Redfoxpress in Ireland, of the visual narrative “Carrier,” which was first released in a limited edition by Portland’s c_L Books. The first volume of an ongoing hybrid serial work, “Sweep,” is forthcoming from Chax Press in Tucson.

Media mentions/resources

• Performance videos:
  • “Selected Durations”(2:26)
  • “Threnos” (3:37)
• Recent episode of “Artists’ Book Unshelved” (Bainbridge Island Museum of Art) devoted in part to “Selected Durations” (10:34)
• Penn Sound author page
• Excerpt from “Sweep”

Chuck Stebelton is author most recently of “One Hundred Patterns & Three Heuristics” (Green Gallery Press in 2023). His previous poetry collections include “An Apostle Island” (Oxeye Press, 2021), “The Platformist” (Cultural Society, 2012), and “Circulation Flowers” (Tougher Disguises, 2005). He served as literary program director at Woodland Pattern from 2005 to 2017, and returned as interim book center manager in 2023. As a Wisconsin Master Naturalist volunteer, he has led workshops and field trips for nonprofit organizations and conservancy groups, including Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters; Milwaukee Public Library; Woodland Pattern Book Center; Friends of Lorine Niedecker; and Lynden Sculpture Garden.

Christie Valentin-Bati is a hybrid poet and photographer interested in the beauty and horrors hidden in the everyday. Unofficially, she’s a suburban kid from Florida, now transplanted to Chicago with too many plants to water. Her work has been commissioned by the ACLU of Ill. and she is a poet-in-residence at Chicago Poetry Center.