This poetry month, we are celebrating with a workshop and reading! Join the Poetry Center of Chicago as we pair up with Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble for a poetry and dance workshop!
Writing exercises will be lead by Ana Castillo, CK Kubasta and movement leaders are Sara Maslanka and Scott Dare. Exercises will consists of deconstructing poems by Ana and CK and devising ways to incorporate movement and breath. Participants will have a chance to work through these poems and poems that they write themselves in groups of poets, dancers, and enthusiasts! We will finish in a reading/performance by the leaders and participants. Everyone will be rewarded at the end with a preview of “Ethereal Abandonment,” an upcoming show at Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble.
Ana Catillo (June 15, 1953-) is a celebrated and distinguished poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scholar. Castillo was born and raised in Chicago. She has contributed to periodicals and on-line venues (Salon and Oxygen) and national magazines including More and the Sunday New York Times. Castillo’s writings have been the subject of numerous scholarly investigations and publications. Among her award winning, best selling titles: novels include So Far From God, The Guardians and Peel My Love like an Onion, among other poetry: I Ask the Impossible. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has been profiled and interviewed on National Public Radio and the History Channel and was a radio-essayist with NPR in Chicago. Ana Castillo is editor of La Tolteca, an arts and literary ‘zine dedicated to the advancement of a world without borders and censorship and on the advisory board of the new American Writers Museum in D.C. In 2014, Dr. Castillo held the Lund-Gil Endowed Chair at Dominican University, River Forest, IL and served on the faculty with Bread Loaf Summer Program (Middlebury Collge) in 2015 and 2016. She also held the first Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University, The Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Visiting Scholar post at M.I.T. and was the Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College in Utah in 2012, among other teaching posts throughout her extensive career. Ana Castillo holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D., University of Bremen, Germany in American Studies and a honorary doctorate from Colby College. She received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel,The Mixquiahuala Letters. Her other awards include a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry. She was also awarded a 1998 Sor Juana Achiecement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago. Dr. Castillo’s So Far From God and Loverboys are two titles on the banned book list controversy with the TUSD in Arizona. 2013 Recipient of the American Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Prize to an independent scholar.
C. Kubasta is the author of the chapbooks, A Lovely Box and &s, and a full-length collection, All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX, 2015). Her next book, Of Covenants, is forthcoming from Whitepoint Press in 2017. She is active with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and serves as Assistant Poetry editor with Brain Mill Press. She thinks poetry, like humor, porn, & horror, should be a body genre. Find her at www.ckubasta.com
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