Featured Writer: Sara Moore Wagner

Thursday, March 23rd, at 7:30 PM, Sara Moore Wagner will be reading a series of her poems for the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University.  

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of multiple collections including Swan Wife, awarded with the 2021 Cider Press Review Editor’s prize, and Hillbilly Madonna, published by Driftwood Press in 2022. Wagner has also authored two chapbooks: Tumbling After released in March of 2022 and Hooked Through published by Five Oaks Press in 2017. Her work has appeared in several publications such as Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Nimrod, Western Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Cincinnati Review. Wagner has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize multiple times as well as Best of the Net and Best New Poets awards.     

Wagner’s poems explore relationships between mother and child, father and son, and other family ties in Appalachia. Several poems address the opiate crisis that heavily ravaged Appalachia and the entire country. Poems such as “Girlhood Landscape” explore the impermanence of beauty through a young girl waning optimism, stating: “because I want to remember blooming. // Because I think I could just bloom.” These poems also depict moments of trauma associated with miscarriages. Her work incorporates fairy tales and folklore, with several poems devoted to sharpshooter Annie Oakley, myths of Tantalus and Thetis, and Biblical figures in works like “Self Portrait as Judas.” 

In her work entitled “Invasive Species,” published by the Normal School in December 2020, Wagner talks about a nest created in a dated wreath. The relationship of mother/daughter and mother bird/hatchlings seems to blur. Both mothers are “separated […] by a door” from their young. The poem closes with: 

We’re all just waiting to crack open  
or be emptied out, to be forced  
from our homes or windows,  
to destroy what we love  
because we need it,  
because we think  
we’re safe.   

There is a sense here of the complicated necessity of letting our loved ones live their own lives, continuing to love them from a distance. This necessary and natural trajectory of love and how it operates exists in these final lines. Perhaps the complexities of love lead to hurt when love is needed most. The shared habitat of the nest on the house’s door creates all these avenues of focus. 

Poem excerpts appear courtesy of Normal School and Saramoorewagner.com. Biographical info also from saramoorewagner.com. 

–Michael J Morris, MAR

Featured Writer: Dustin Pearson

On Thursday, February 16th, Dustin Pearson will read his poetry as part of the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. The reading will take place at 7:30 at Prout Chapel at BGSU.

Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud, Millennial Roost, and A Family Is a House. Dustin also has work which appears in The Nation, The Boiler, Blackbird, Bennington Review, Poetry Daily, The Literary Review, The Cortland Review, among other publications. Dustin is an Assistant Professor teaching creative writing at the University of Toledo.

Pearson’s work explores themes of love, loss, abuse, trauma, and hope. His work is both raw and honest, and while woeful at times, still carries grace and hope in its folds. Pearson views his writing as a way to artfully call on his lived experiences and observations, zooming in on them in the process. In an interview with Florida State University’s English Department, Pearson iterates, “I like to think of the writing as holding a magnifying glass to different aspects of that experience. The aesthetic presentation of the resulting writing is determined by how much I prioritize my internalized perception of what I’ve experienced or a more assimilated or recognizable one, which I think people most often call reality.” Indeed, there is a malleability to truth, experience, and the expression of them; in his poem “Souls Side by Side” Pearson writes to that end:

“He creeps

around us

pining

like he hadn’t died

when he first left.

Father, why

are you dying?

We killed you.

You should be dead.”

(from theboilerjournal dot com)

With the pain in Pearson’s writing, however, love and tenderness comes hand-in-hand. In “A Difference,” a brother’s broken arm is bandaged. In “Fossil Fuel,” hope is within reach: “The loss is overwhelming, but ahead of you, there are tracks. You want to fall but think not again, and you think: no matter the man the tracks belong to, you must find him.”

—Mays Kuhail, MAR

(Poem excerpts courtesy of The Boiler and The Account Magazine, biographical information from dustinkpearson dot com)

Featured Writer: Laura Walter

Laura Maylene Walter will read her work as part of the Prout Reading Series hosted by Bowling Green State University in Prout Chapel, January 26th, at 7:30pm.

Laura Maylene Walter is an author, editor, and BGSU alum currently based in Cleveland Ohio. She has been published in Poets & Writers, The Sun, Literary Hub, Kenyon Review, Slate, Ninth Letter, The Masters Review, and many more journals and publications. Her awards and recognitions are as numerous as her publication locales: a finalist in the Ohioana Book Awards, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, achieving fiction book of the month from UK Booksellers Association, etc. To add to her numerous accomplishments, the sheer volume of her pieces makes it impossible to include them all here. Most notably, she is the author of the short story collection “Living Arrangements” and has just debuted her first novel, Body of Stars published by Dutton. 

Walter’s early work explored dark themes, largely based on the death of her mother when she was twenty, “Even so, I often find myself returning to that period of my life, particularly when I write nonfiction. I think it’s because, as difficult as that time was for me, the darkness made it rich” (Kenyonreview). Her most recent piece Body of Stars is a speculative feminist piece that explores the future as it relates to bodies, “an exploration of fate and female agency in a world similar to our own” (Ohiocenterforthebook). The premise of this up-and-coming piece focuses on the placement of women’s moles being able to predict future events. What Book Riot calls “a story of devastation, rebuilding, grief, and hope,” Walker’s Body of Stars is a debut of terrific promise.

—Kennedy Lomont, MAR

Featured Writer: Leila Chatti

At 7:30pm EST, on Thursday, October 13th, poet Leila Chatti will read her work in Prout Chapel as part of the 2022 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. 

Through her collection Deluge, Leila Chatti chronicles her experience with illness, uncontrollable bleeding referred to as “flooding,” surgery, and remission through explorations of narratives of religious punishment, womanhood, shame, and oscillations of doubt and faith. Fittingly, Chatti’s poems are preoccupied with the grand scope of existence, as we are suspended by our pain and grief between the infinities before birth and after death. “Indeed, one day I will return to God, as it is to Him that I belong.” she writes in her poem “Testimony,” continuing “Indeed, this was part of the Message and the Message was received. / I do not speak for God and He does not speak to me. / This an (arrangement/estrangement). / When asked my religion I answer surrender.” Despite their scope, Chatti roots these poems squarely in the body, allowing worldly pain to evidence the divine; in “Mary in the Waiting Room at the Gynecologist’s office,” she writes “In my hand, an empty cup. / Mary crosses / her legs, fingers the slender / chain around her neck. / She rubs her thumb against / the pendant’s tiny face, his miniature / arms permanently splayed.” Leila Chatti’s poems are as candid as they are intense, and as excruciating in their origins as they are compassionate at their hearts. You absolutely must pick up her work.

—Samuel Burt, MAR

Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. Among her many achievements, she was selected as winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Chatti has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and more. Her debut full-length collection Deluge was published by Copper Canyon in 2020, and you can find her work in The New York Times Magazine, POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and lives and teaches in the Midwest.

(Biographical info and poems courtesy of leilachatti dot com)