4 poets + 2 stages = POEMPALOOZA!!!

Get ready! Thursday, Dec. 4, we've got a doubleheader fireworks display of poetry: nothing short of a Poempalooza, a twenty-one-gun salute of verse to close out the fall semester.

1. First, the FELIX Series presents Kimberly Johnson and our own Amaud Jamaul Johnson at 4:00pm in Memorial Library Room 126.

Kimberly Johnson is a translator, Renaissance scholar, and the author of two books of poems, A Metaphorical God and Leviathan with a Hook. Her poems appear widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Slate, and The Iowa Review. Johnson has received prizes from the Merton Foundation and the Utah Arts Council, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Salt Lake City.

"These are wild, inventive, hungry, celebratory poems. Kimberly Johnson rises in a few lines from weevils to threshing the stars. She is a worthy reader of the Psalms and the Book of Job; she has something of Hopkins' eye for the blessed particular, and his tongue for full-bodied song. These poems fear neither glory nor ruin."—Rosanna Warren

Amaud Jamaul Johnson is a native son of Compton, California and author of Red Summer (Tupelo Press, 2004 Dorset Prize winner). He received his BA in English from Howard University and a MPS in African American Studies from Cornell University. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and a member of the Cave Canem Workshop, he is widely published in journals and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconson-Madison.

"Johnson speaks from a space he describes at one point as 'between gravity and god' – that is, past the provable, material world, but just shy of any clear confirmation of prayer or faith – and it's a particular kind of faith that these poems at once enact and point to, what Robert Hayden called 'The deep immortal human wish, / timeless will,' the will to believe. Johnson's poems remind us that the human record is at last a mixed one: violence, shame, betrayal, and fear, but also joy, courage, love and, yes, hope." — Carl Phillips

2. Then, join us that evening at Avol's Books at 7:00pm for the grand finale of the Blue Ox Reading Series featuring poetry by MFA candidates Kristen Muir and Laurel Bastian. It's going to be awesome.

Thanks again to Michael Fusco & Emma Straub for our terrific Blue Ox Reading Series posters!