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Raina J. León + Paul Casey
April 5, 2016 @ 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm UTC+0
As part of a Poetry Month celebration, Pegasus Books presents a reading with local poet Raina Leon and visiting Irish poet Paul Casey
Both authors have new books of poetry, released in 2016 by Salmon Poetry
Raina J. León, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006), CantoMundo fellow, and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols, was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (2006). Her second book, Boogeyman Dawn (2013, Salmon Poetry), was a finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Prize (2010). Her third book,sombra : (dis)locate, will be published in 2016. She has received fellowships and residencies with Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latino and Latina arts. She is an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Paul Casey was born in Cork, Ireland in 1968. Recently awarded a travel bursary from Culture Ireland, he will be reading at a number of venues around Los Angeles and San Francisco to promote his second collection of poetry, Virtual Tides (Salmon Poetry, 2016). His début, home more or less, appeared from Salmon in 2012.He grew up between Ireland, Zambia and South Africa, and has worked primarily in film, multimedia and teaching. While employed as scriptwriting lecturer at the Nelson Mandela University, he convened the greater Port Elizabeth Poetry Competition in three languages and four age-groups. His poems have been published in journals and anthologies in Ireland, the US, China and South Africa. A chapbook of his longer poems, It’s Not all Bad, was published by The Heaventree Press in May 2009. In June 2010 he completed a poetry-film based on the award-winning poem by Ian Duhig, The Lammas Hireling, which premiered at the Zebra Poetry-Film Festival in Berlin. He is the founder and organiser of the weekly Ó Bhéal poetry reading series in Cork city, where he lives.