SPECTRA Reading Series — Foster-Stahl Chapbook Series Release
featuring Laura A Ring and Aubrey Ryan + openers TBA
Join us at Rozz-Tox on November 11 as we celebrate the release of the first two chapbook published as part of the Foster-Stahl Chapbook Series, started in 2020 by MWC Press. Both chapbooks will be available for purchase ($10 each or $15 for both).
Pre-orders for both chapbooks are available now: https://www.mwcqc.org/books/
7pm doors | 8pm show
Free & Open | $5 suggested donation
Masks required & all attendees must show proof of vaccination (a photo is acceptable) OR a negative Covid test dated up to 3 days prior to entry.
“This book is testament to what a palimpsest the imagination is, if only we would allow one layer to be scratched away until the next shines through, then the next and the next until we see we are not at all alone, especially not in the mind. Laura A. Ring excavates the imagination—brilliantly and gently, as if a fragment of thought could be harmed if mishandled—and unearths the contingencies upon which insight relies…”
—Katie Ford, author of Blood Lyrics and If You Have to Go
Laura A. Ring’s book Field Notes Recovered from the Expedition to Devil’s Peak was selected as the inaugural winner of the Foster-Stahl chapbook competition. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Stirring, Rogue Agent, and Dream Pop, among other places. Laura holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where she serves as the Librarian in charge of the Southern Asia and Anthropology collections. Her ethnography Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building was published by Indiana University Press.
“With Choir, Aubrey Ryan has created a new myth most needed. It tells of an origin before our origin story, and it stirs the story of our end… As in the Greek plays, Ryan enlists a chorus most convincing—hers are oracles, guardians, bees—to help in the telling. Because it is a horrifying tale, but she knows the story of the end must be the kindest tale of all.”
—Beth Roberts, author of Brief Moral History in Blue and Like You
Aubrey Ryan is the author of Good Beast, winner of the Phantom Books Breitling Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Pinwheel, Anti-, Matter, Hobart, Booth, New Madrid, El Aleph, Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and elsewhere. Her poems have been featured on broadsides by Joseph Lappie and Team Nerd Letterpress. Aubrey is the winner of the Booth Poetry Prize and has been three times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Iowa with her husband, two sons, a cat, and a garden.
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The 2020 Foster-Stahl Chapbook Series is supported by the MWC Legacy Society, the estate of Mary Foster, memorial contributions made to MWC in the name of Richard “Dick” Stahl, The Poetry Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council Agency