Christian Hawkey, Mores McWreath and Cole Swensen

Come celebrate the publication of Ventrakl and Greensward, with authors Christian Hawkey and Cole Swensen, and an artist Mores McWreath.
This event is free and open to the public.

Christian Hawkey is the author of three previous books of poetry. His first book, The Book of Funnels, appeared in 2004 and won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, a chapbook called HourHour, includes drawings by the artist Ryan Mrowzowski, and was published by Delirium Press in 2005. Citizen Of, his third book, was released by Wave Books in the spring of 2007, and received enthusiastic reviews from numerous magazines and online journals, including Time Out New York, Octopus, Sillman’s Blog, and the New Yorker. His poems have appeared in Conjunctions, Volt, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Crowd, BOMB, Chicago Review, Best American Poetry, and Conduit, and his art criticism has appeared in Frieze and Meatpaper. He has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Fund, and in 2006 he received a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award. In 2008 he was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow. He is currently an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, where he teaches the practice of writing poetry in the Writing Program.

Cole Swensen is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, most recently Ours (University of California Press, 2008) and The Glass Age (Alice James Books, 2007). Her 2004 title, Goest, was a finalist for the National Book Award; other volumes have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, Sun and Moon’s New American Writing Award, and the National Poetry Series. She is the co-editor with David St. John of the recent Norton anthology American Hybrid. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. She is also a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism; her translation of Jean Fremon’s The Island of the Dead won the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation, and she has received translation grants from the Association Beaumarchais and French Centre du Livre. She is the founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to experimental French poetry translated by English-language poets, and the co-director of the annual Reid Hall Translation Seminar in Paris. She was the writer-in-residence at Yale’s Beinecke Library in 2007-2008, where the project Greensward was conceived and written. She has served as a visiting writer at Brown University and Grinnell College, and is on the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Mores McWreath was born in Washington, Pennsylvania in 1980. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from the University of Southern California. He attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 2008-09. In 2009 he had his first solo show in New York at CUE Art Foundation curated by Andrea Zittel. His work has been exhibited in group shows at the ICA Philadelphia, the Walker Art Center, Art in General, and John Connelly Presents. His videos have been screened in festivals and exhibitions both nationally and internationally. He teaches at The Cooper Union.