SPECTRA Reading Series & the Young Emerging Writers Summer Internship Program
are Proud to Present… MARCUS WICKER & Young Quad City Writers @ the Figge
SPECTRA & Young Emerging Writers are thrilled to announce two special poetry events featuring award-winning poet Marcus Wicker.
First, Wicker will lead a poetry workshop open to all student writers (ages 15-19) in the Quad City area. The workshop will take place on Wednesday, July 18 from 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. in the Community Room of the Rock Island Public Library in downtown Rock Island. This workshop is free & open; RSVP’s are appreciated. Please contact Ryan Collins at 309-732-7330 or mwc@midwestwritingcenter.org if you plan to attend.
The next evening, Thursday, July 19, the Figge Art Museum will host a reading with a number of the best young writers in the Quad Cities opening up for Marcus Wicker. Interns from the Midwest Writing Center’s Young Emerging Writers Program will read along with other young writers from the community, followed by a featured reading from Marcus Wicker, whose most recent collection SILENCER was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, and won the Society of Midland Authors Award, as well as the Arnold Adoff Poetry Award for New Voices. The event will start with a reception at 5:30 p.m., followed by youth readings will start at 6:30 p.m. and Marcus Wicker will close out the evening at 7:30 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.
As a special feature to this event, and thanks to a grant from the Regional Development Authority, MWC is able to offer a limited number of free copies of SILENCER to libraries, community organizations, and individuals interested in organizing/participating in book discussions in advance of the 7/19 event–including a discussion led by poet and MWC Executive Director Ryan Collins at MWC on Mon. 7/16 from 3-4pm.
**If you are interested in acquiring copies of SILENCER, please contact Ryan Collins at mwc@midwestwritingcenter.org or 309 732 7330**
Marcus Wicker is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, The Missouri Review‘s Miller Audio Prize, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, and the Fine Arts Work Center. His first collection Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial), a National Poetry Series winner, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, and Boston Review. His second book, Silencer—also an Image Award finalist—was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017 and won the Society of Midland Authors Award, as well as the Arnold Adoff Poetry Award for New Voices. Marcus teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis, and he is the poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review. Learn more about Marcus Wicker: http://marcuswicker.com.
These event are made possible thanks to the generous support of the Regional Development Authority, the Figge Art Museum, and the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
