Alicia Mountain, Steffi Drewes, Tonya M. Foster, and Mg Roberts

Poems! By four poets! We’re excited to welcome Alicia Mountain’s BRAND NEW book High Ground Coward into the world! With readings from three amazing Bay Area poets, Steffi Drewes, Mg Roberts, and Tonya M. Foster, as well!

ALICIA MOUNTAIN is the author of High Ground Coward (University of Iowa Press, April 2018) which was awarded the 2017 Iowa Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Thin Fire, is forthcoming from BOAAT Press. Mountain’s poems can be found in Guernica, jubilat, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, an Idyllwild Arts Fellow and a resident at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is a queer poet, PhD candidate at the University of Denver, and assistant editor of the Denver Quarterly. Mountain earned her MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula.

Steffi Drewes is the author of Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow (Kelsey Street Press) and four poetry chapbooks, most recently New Animal from dancing girl press. Her work has been featured in various journals and event series, including the 2018 Way Bay Poetry Assembly and postcard project at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She has attended writing and art residencies at Vermont Studio Center, The Desert House in California, and the Wassaic Project in New York, where she debuted an original set of photo-based tarot cards and performed personalized readings. These days she works as a freelance writer and editor.

Tonya M. Foster was raised in New Orleans, LA. She is the author of the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os and the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court, which Stephen Burt describes as “the long-delayed American apotheosis of haiku form.” In a review, Patricia Spears Jones notes that “Foster’ s imaginative work glories in language’s ambiguities, discords, emotions and logic—she allows that imaginative thrall to explore race and gender and political dysfunction.” A coeditor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art, Foster has had work published in Best American Experimental Writing (2016), boundary2, Litscapes: Collected US Writings 2015, Callaloo, MiPoesias, Western Humanities Review, the Hat, and elsewhere.Foster has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Graduate Center, CUNY, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Macdowell Colony, the Pan African literary Festival, and elsewhere.

Mg Roberts is a multimedia artist, teacher, publisher and poet. She is the author of the poetry collections Anemal Uter Meck (Black Radish Books, 2017) and not so, sea (Durga Press, 2014). Mg is a Kundiman Fellow, Kelsey Street Press member, VONA/Voices Alum and sits on the Board of Small Press Traffic. Her work has appeared in Dusie, Bombay Gin, Web Conjunctions, Elderly and elsewhere. Currently she is co-editing Responses, New Writing, Flesh with Ronaldo V.  Wilson; an anthology on the urgency of avant-garde writing written for and by writers of color. She lives in Oakland with three daughters, array of animals and geologist husband.