Poets Michael Klein, Joan Larkin, and Tony Leuzzi will read their poems. Each poet will read old and new poems, thereby promoting their past publications and generating buzz for their recent work.

Michael Klein’s third book of poems, The Talking Day (Sibling Rivalry Press) was both a Thom Gunn Award Finalist and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.  His second book, then, we were still living (GenPop Books), was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and his first book, 1990, tied with James Schuyler’s Collected Poems to win the award in 1993.  His new book, A Life in the Theater will be published in the fall of 2015 by Sibling Rivalry Press.  He also has written a collection of short, lyric essays, “States of Independence” which won the 2011 BLOOM Chapbook contest in non-fiction judged by Rigoberto Gonzalez and was published in 2012 and two memoirs Track Conditions (Lambda Literary Award finalist) and The End of Being Known, both published by the University of Wisconsin Press.  His poems, essays and interviews with American poets have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Bloom, Fence, Tin House, Ploughshares, Provincetown Arts, Poets & Writers and many other publications.  He has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Binghamton University, Manhattanville and for the last 20 years has been part of the graduate writing faculty at Goddard College, in Vermont.  For many years he was on the faculty of the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was a fellow in 1990 and now teaches at Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro, Massachusetts.  He lives in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts and teaches at Hunter College.

Joan Larkin’s fifth poetry collection, Blue Hanuman, was published in spring 2014 by Hanging Loose Press. Among her previous books, My Body: New and Selected Poems received the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. Other work includes Lambda Award winner Cold River, which served as the basis for her play The AIDS Passion; Sor Juana’s Love Poems, translated with Jaime Manrique; and the twenty-poem chapbook Legs Tipped with Small Claws. Joan was an activist publisher during the feminist literary explosion of the ’70s and ’80s, coeditor of several anthologies of poetry and prose, and author of two books in the Hazelden recovery series.  She has taught writing at Brooklyn College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Drew University MFA program in poetry, among many other places, most recently serving as Grace Hazard Conkling Writer in Residence at Smith College.  Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Tony Leuzzi’s third book of poems, The Burning Door, was published by Tiger Bark Press in spring 2014.  His previous poetry collection, Radiant Losses (2010), won the 2009 New Sins Editor’s Prize, judged by Rane Arroyo.  He has authored several chapbooks, including “Fake Book” (Anything Anymore Anywhere Press 2011) and “40,000 Crows” (Hank’s Loose Gravel Press 2012).  In fall 2012, BOA Editions published Passwords Primeval, Leuzzi’s interviews with 20 leading American poets.  As a visual artist, Leuzzi has held exhibitions of his collage, assemblage, and erasure paintings, many of which have informed or are informed by his poems.  Currently an Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Monroe Community College, in Rochester, NY, Leuzzi has earned the Wesley T. Hansen Award for Excellence in Teaching and the State University of New York’s Chancellor’s Award for Creativity and Scholarship.  He also oversees the college’s Creative Reading Series in fiction and poetry.  His poems and interviews have been published or are forthcoming in National Poetry Review, Sentence, Great River Review, Arts& Letters, Provincetown Arts, American Literary Review, and elsewhere.  He is a staff writer of book reviews and literary criticism for The Brooklyn Rail.