The Paper Plains Literary Festival presents Philip Metres and Erika Meitner

Two writers steeped in the documentary poetry tradition, Philip Metres and Erika Meitner, present a joint reading of their urgent, political, and deeply felt poetry. Metres reads from his new collection Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020) and Meitner reads from Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2019).

Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner, Copia (BOA Editions, 2014), and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. In 2015, she was the US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, and she has also received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in Creative Writing.

Philip Metres is the author and translator of eleven books and chapbooks, including The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan 2018); Pictures at an Exhibition (University of Akron 2016);; Sand Opera (Alice James 2015); and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2015). Recipient of two NEA fellowships, the Lannan Fellowship, and , two Arab American Book Awards, he is a professor of English and the director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

Erika Meitner & Philip Metres: Two Poets