Online Admission is free
Zoom event hosted by Toadstool Books
Books can be purchased at www.toadbooks.com

To register for the Loomzoom event visit  http://www.toadbooks.com/loomzoom. A Zoom link will be sent out to The Loom email list. If you want to add your name, please email rebeccagibson55@gmail.com.

Jennifer Militello

About A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016)

“The stylistic richness Militello has wrought from such raw perceptive material is of a fascinating complexity and brilliance.She has taken the lessons of generations of poets and used them to inscribe a soul-progression we experience as deeply as we can stand to read.”

– Colorado Review

“This is a book of ecstatic revelations, griefs and betrayals. Relationships and narratives are implied within a lyric framework. It has been a long time since I read a book of poems that seems less about meaning and more about sound… [Militello] stretches herself into new sound-shapes, often employing a complicated scheme of rhymes and half-rhymes. Like Emily Dickinson, one of her great forebears, she likes to work in tiny containers…She is simply unafraid of the ecstatic…

– North American Review, Sean Thomas Dougherty

“I generally think of what I myself bring to a poem: a desire to be transformed, a desire to see anew, a willingness to open myself to any possible combination of images or comparisons, and of course a hope for that moment that is so exactly true and right that it leaves me breathless…”

– Jennifer Militello, Kenyon Review, 2011 interview

Chen Chen

About When I Grow Up, I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities –winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. (BOA Editions, 2017):

“The greatest achievement of this book is its singular and sustained voice, poem after poem of a speaker whose obsessive and curious nature is that of an adult who refuses to give up seeing through the eyes of an adolescent, one who believes that the world is a malleable place and that asking the right questions changes its form.…This is an astounding meeting of peace with empire, of nature with technology and of the individual with the perception others have that he couldn’t possibly be individual at all.”

– Jericho Brown, The Tradition (Copper Canyon, 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

“Chen Chen shows us that the world is strange and bright with ardor.He reminds us of the miracle of the sensual and sensory.”

– Aracelis Girmay, the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016)

“I build my courses around encouraging and challenging students to become active members of a creative, scholarly, and compassionate community.”

– Chen Chen, on teaching