Three Award-Winning Able Muse Authors Read - Free Admission for All

Able Muse Authors Reading

Date: Friday, February 26, 7-8PM EST

Join us for a virtual reading and Q&A with three acclaimed, award-winning Able Muse Press authors--

~  ~  ~

About the Readers:

- Stephen Kampa: Featured Poet, Able Muse, Print Edition, Number 28, Winter 2020/2021;
- Emily Leithauser: Winner, Able Muse Book Award 2015 with The Borrowed World;
- Chelsea Woodard: Finalist, Able Muse Book Award 2013 with Vellum.

Stephen Kampa was born in Missoula, Montana, and raised in Daytona Beach, Florida. He holds degrees from Carleton College and the Johns Hopkins University. His books are Cracks in the Invisible (Ohio University Press, 2011), Bachelor Pad (Waywiser Press, 2014), and Articulate as Rain (Waywiser Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2018 and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic (Knopf, 2020). He has also worked as a musician for over a decade, and his session work can be heard on Robert “Top” Thomas’s The Town Crier (WildRoots Records) and Victor Wainwright’s Boom Town (Blind Pig Records). Currently, he teaches at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida.

Emily Leithauser’s first collection of poems, The Borrowed World, was published in 2016 and is the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Prize. She is the recipient of the Grand Prize in Poetry, judged by Vijay Seshadri, for the 2015 Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival. Her poems and translations have appeared in New Ohio Review, Literary Imagination, Literary Matters, Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, and the Common, among other journals. Her scholarship has been published in the Hopkins Review and the Global South. In addition to poetry and poetics, her interests include British and Irish literature, French and Francophone poetry, memory and elegy, and theories of metaphor.
      Leithauser studied French History and Literature at Harvard University and earned a certificate in Publishing at the Columbia School of Journalism. She earned her PhD in English at Emory University, where she also taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor in English and Creative Writing. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana. She lives with her husband, daughter, and two dogs in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Chelsea Woodard’s first collection, Vellum, was published by Able Muse Press in 2014, and was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Her second collection, Solitary Bee, was published by Measure Press in 2016.
      Her poems have also appeared in the Threepenny Review, Southwest Review, Blackbird, American Arts Quarterly, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her poem “Finding the Porn Magazines,” was chosen for the 2011 Best New Poets Anthology, and her poem “Wren’s Nest” received 3rd place in the 2017 William Matthews Poetry Prize competition. She has been invited as a visiting writer at Union College and Arkansas Tech University, and was a Walter E. Dakin fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2017.
      She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in New Hampshire and teaches in the English Department at Phillips Exeter Academy.

~  ~  ~

About the Host:

Melissa Balmain: Winner, Able Muse Book Award 2013 with Walking in on People

Melissa Balmain is a humorist, journalist, and teacher. Since 2012 she has edited Light, the country's longest-running journal of light verse (founded in 1992 by John Mella). Balmain's poems have appeared in the American Bystander, American Life in Poetry, the Hopkins Review, Lighten Up Online, Literary Matters, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, the New Criterion, the New Verse News, Poetry Daily, the Spectator (UK), Verse Daily, the Washington Post, and many anthologies; her prose in the New Yorker, the New York Times, McSweeney’s, the Satirist, and elsewhere. A former columnist for Success magazine and other publications, she's the author of a memoir, Just Us: Adventures of a Mother and Daughter (Faber and Faber). Balmain has received national honors for her journalism, including the National Society for Newspaper Columnists humorous columnist award and multiple Pulitizer Prize nominations. In poetry, she won the 2020 Poetry by the Sea sonnet award and has been a finalist for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award (twice), and the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award. She teaches at the University of Rochester and lives nearby with her husband and two children. Walking in on People, chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award, is her first full-length poetry collection. Two more poetry collections are in the works.

~  ~  ~

Free Admission for All. Sign-Up Required.