1800 Reverend Abraham Woods Jr Boulevard, Birmingham, AL 35203

Schedule and catering information TBA

Workshop Speakers:

Heidi Lynn Staples & Kwoya Fagin Maples. Currently Topics TBA

Bios:

Heidi Lynn Staples’ debut collection, Guess Can Gallop, was selected by Brenda Hillman as a winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is the author of three other collections, including Noise Event (Ahsahta, 2013), and her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, Ploughshares, Women’s Studies Quarterly and elsewhere. With the poet Amy King, she is editor and founder of Poets for Living Waters, begun as an international response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and of Big Energy Poets: When Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change, forthcoming from BlazeVOX.

Staples was raised by gopher tortoises in the Southeastern temperate forests of North America, both on and off the Gulf Coastal Plain — aka The Sticks — and she has spent several years of her adult life residing in Europe. She holds the MFA from Syracuse University and the PhD from the University of Georgia.

Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer from Charleston, S.C. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and is a graduate Cave Canem Fellow. She is the author of Mend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018). In addition to a chapbook publication by Finishing Line Press entitled Something of Yours (2010) her work is published in several journals and anthologies including Blackbird Literary Journal, Obsidian, Berkeley Poetry Review, The African-American Review, Pluck!, Cave Canem Anthology XIII, The Southern Women’s Review, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Her most recent poetry collection, Mend, was finalist for the AWP Prize. Mend tells the story of the birth of gynecology and the role black enslaved women played in that process. This work received a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.

Maples teaches Creative Writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and directs a three-dimensional poetry exhibit which features poetry and visual art including original paintings, photography, installations and film.