In her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison explores mood and madness, the terror and turmoil of living with mental illness. Join us for an afternoon of poetry from those with unquiet minds, their loved ones, and professional healers – work that encompasses the experience of living and wrestling with all manner of inner demons, treatment, relationships, social stigma and more.
Featured Readers: Rosie Accola, Robin Behn, Mayra Yvette Gutierrez, Adrienne Nadeau, Jen Rouse, Marian Kaplun Shapiro
Rosie Accola is a zine-maker, editor, and poet based out of Chicago. She recently graduated from the school of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in writing. Her first full-length, Tender Dweeb, is forthcoming via Ghost City Press.
Robin Behn is the author of five volumes of poems, Quarry Cross, The Yellow House, Horizon Note, The Red Hour, and Paper Bird, and two chapbooks. She is co-editor of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach, and editor of a new resource for young writers, Once Upon a Time in the Twenty-First Century: Unexpected Exercises in Creative Writing. Robin Behn teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama. Her website includes poems-inside-music with Robin both reading and playing music for her poems inspired by traditional fiddle tunes: https://robinbehn.com/.
Mayra Yvette Gutierrez is a twenty-three-year-old, demisexual, Latina. She is a University of Illinois at Chicago Alum. There she studied English with a concentration in American Literature, and a minor in History. She has a passion for social justice, learning, and supporting other women. She loves sunflowers, books, and laying on the floor. Her debut poetry book White Lies is available on Amazon.
Over the past decade Adrienne Nadeau has facilitated workshops and performed poetry at theaters, schools, prisons, summer camps, coffee shops, bookstores, and bars. ADRIENNE has toured internationally, gracing stages in Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, and Paris … Although she can usually be found cursing at the snow, playing cribbage, and writing in Chicago dive bars.
Jen Rouse is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poet Lore, Midwestern Gothic, Wicked Alice, Parentheses, Yes Poetry, Crab Fat Magazine, Up the Staircase, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist for the Mississippi Review 2018 Prize Issue and was the winner of the 2017 Gulf Stream Summer Contest Issue. Rouse’s chapbook, Acid and Tender, was a finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize and published in 2016 by Headmistress Press. Riding with Anne Sexton, Rouse’s second book, is forthcoming from Bone & Ink Press in collaboration with dancing girl press. Her plays have been produced by SPT Theatre Company and Theatre Cedar Rapids. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.
Marian Kaplun Shapiro, a Quaker and a psychologist, lives and practices in Lexington, Mass., but her poetry seems to communicate more closely with the creative senses of Chicago, where she has never lived! She was delighted to read at the Women Made Gallery in 2008, and felt delighted to be asked to again, reading to and listening to the voices of fine women poets in this wonderful venue. Marian is the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1988), a poetry book, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007) and two chapbooks: Your Third Wish, (Finishing Line, 2007); and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House, 2007). She has been a five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts, and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012. She is now experimenting with visual poetry which, alas, is difficult to ‘read’ aloud.
WMG Literary Team
Nina Corwin — WMG Literary Events Curator
Nina Corwin is a published poet, Founding Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and psychotherapist/advocate for victims of sexual assault. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Uncertainty of Maps and Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Her work has appeared in ACM, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, Verse and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Corwin is an Advisory Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and co-edited Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art By Women. She has read and performed her work across the country, at times set with musical or choreographic compositions.
Jennifer Steele – WMG Literary Events Outreach Coordinator
Jennifer Steele is a published poet and educator and serves as Partnerships Coordinator for Teen Services at Chicago Public Library. She served as co-founder and co-curator of the Revolving Door Reading Series. Her work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Callaloo Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Warpland Journal, So To Speak, and others, and is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow. She has taught creative writing and digital media arts across Chicago since 2008 and has collaborated with numerous youth organizations and cultural institutions, designing innovative arts programming.
Kurt Eric Heintz – WMG Literary Events Audio Recordist
Kurt Eric Heinz once taught computer graphics programming at Columbia College, and worked as an independent web developer. He’s since become the lead video director at Britannica. Heintz is known for his poetry videos, begun in the early 1990s. He also videoconferenced his colleagues’ poetry in the late 1990s — years before Skype and the iPhone. He was a technical adviser to the Electronic Literature Organization in its earliest years, and is the video content editor for Another Chicago Magazine.
Thank you Angela Narciso Torres, for your wonderful work and support for WMG and our Literary Program!
For an archive of past readings visit: http://voices.e-poets.net/WMG recorded by Kurt Heintz.