Caffe Lena Poetry Open Mic Featuring Shira Dentz and Suzanne Parker

Shira Dentz is the author of two books, black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman, 2011) and door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press, 2013), and two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman, 2012) and Sisyphusina (forthcoming from Red Glass Books). Her third full-length manuscript was a National Poetry Series finalist this year. Her writing appears in many journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and New American Writing, and has featured online at The Academy of American Poets’ website (Poets.org), NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Her awards include an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem Award and Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Utah. Shira is also Reviews Editor at Drunken Boat and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Suzanne Parker is a winner of the Kinereth Gensler Book Award; her collection of poetry, Viral, was published by Alice James Books in Sept. 2013.  Poems from the book that were published in Hunger Mountain have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Drunken Boat,  Hunger Mountain, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Rattapallax, and numerous other journals, and she is a winner of the Alice M. Sellars Award from the Academy of American Poets and was a Poetry Fellow at the Prague Summer Seminars.