Join Red Hen Press for a reading with poets who focus on writing about experiences often looked over by conventional writing and media. National Book Award recipient and queer writing pioneer Mark Doty is accompanied by Jason Schneiderman, whose work challenges not only hetero-normative ideas, but the forms in which they are understood. Salon writer Heather Aimee O’Neill will also be reading from her new selection of poetry that confronts news and facts with poetic deconstruction. These writers are joined by America Hart, whose work is both a hybrid and genre-bending challenge to identity and the past.

Mark Doty is the author of several collections of poetry, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which received the 2008 National Book Award.

Jason Schneiderman is Associate Editor of Painted Bride Quarterly and Poetry Editor of Bellevue Literary Review. His poetry collection Primary Source (Red Hen Press, forthcoming April 2016) won the 2014 Benjamin Saltman award, and his poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry,The Poetry Review, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and lives in Brooklyn.

Heather Aimee O’Neill is the award-winning author of the poetry collection Memory Future (Gold Line Press, 2011), and co-author with Jessica Piazza of her new collection, Obliterations (Red Hen Press, forthcoming April 2016). She teaches creative writing at CUNY Hunter College and the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and two sons.

Born and raised in Colorado, America Hart lived in Boston and New York City before moving to London, where she received her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies. She is the author of the genre-bending poetry-prose novel into the silence: the fishing story (Red Hen Press, 2014). She directs the MA Creative Writing Program at London Metropolitan University and lives in London with her partner, Seraphim.