Guest Speaker: Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book is Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). Publisher’s Weekly writes: "In the midst of financial crisis, Duhamel’s 11th collection opens with prose poems printed on the back of pretend $100,000 bills, whose shape limits the length of the poems, suggesting the ways that money limits art and the world in which art is made. Although long lines and expository prose blocks dominate this collection, the poet’s lyricism emerges in moments when she employs traditional form in surprising ways, such as a sestina in which every line ends with a variant of Sean Penn’s surname. Duhamel has written some of the first poetry to deeply register the current economic crisis."

Her other titles include Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001); The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997). A bilingual edition of her poems, Afortunada de mí (Lucky Me), translated into Spanish by Dagmar Buchholz and David Gonzalez, came out in 2008 with Bartleby Editores (Madrid.)

A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, Denise Duhamel is an associate professor at Florida International University in Miami. She has read her work on NPR and as a featured poet on the PBS special "Fooling with Words," hosted by Bill Moyers. William D. Waltz, in Rain Taxi, writes "As I read her work . . . I feel like I'm taking a sneak peek at the future: Duhamel hints at a poetry that transcends irony and alienation. There's plenty of both here, but she's busy working them over . . . pushing so hard that the next step may be beyond what is known."

Guest Speaker: Marilyn Taylor
Why Bother To Rhyme? Some Answers From An Addict

MARILYN L. TAYLOR, Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2009 and 2010, is the author of five poetry collections, with a sixth forthcoming from Parallel Press in mid-2009.  Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The American Scholar, POETRY, Smartish Pace, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, The Formalist, and First Things.  She has taken First Place in recent contests sponsored by The Atlanta Review, Passager, The Ledge, and GSU Review, and was awarded the Dogwood Prize for a crown of sonnets titled “The Good-Girl Chronicles”.  Her collection titled Subject to Change (David Robert Books, 2004) was nominated for the nationally recognized Poets’ Prize.

Marilyn has taught poetry and poetics for fifteen years in the Department of English and for the Honors College at  the University of  Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  She has led workshops for Milwaukee’s Woodland Pattern Book Center,  Redbird Studio, AllWriters Studio, Lakeland College, Fond du Lac’s Windhover Center for the Arts, Lawrence University’s Bjorklunden Seminar Center, and elsewhere in Wisconsin and throughout the country.  She has been actively involved for many years at the annual West Chester Poetry Conference in West Chester, PA, where she has chaired several panels and critical seminars on aspects of formalism. 

In 2004 and 2005, Marilyn served as Poet Laureate of Milwaukee.  Currently she is a Contest Co-Chair for the Council for Wisconsin Writers, and a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.  She is also a Contributing Editor for THE WRITER magazine, where her columns on craft appear bimonthly.