In Conversation: Jessica Cuello & Jan Beatty

Join us for an In Conversation with poets Jessica Cuello & Jan Beatty. Jessica will read from her new book, Liar, and Jan will be reading from her book The Body Wars and a conversation will ensue about writing, community, and more!

Jessica Cuello

Jessica Cuello’s Liar was selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize and her manuscript Yours, Creature is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in spring of 2023. Cuello is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is a poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in CNY.

Jan Beatty

Jan Beatty’s seventh book, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award, 2021. A new chapbook, Skydog, was released in May, 2022 by Lefty Blondie Press. The University of Pittsburgh Press published The Body Wars in Fall, 2020, and in the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said: Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Other books include Jackknife: New and Collected Poems (2018 Paterson Prize), named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019; The Switching/Yard, Red Sugar, Boneshaker, and Mad River, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Beatty worked as a waitress, an abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. For fifteen years, she directed creative writing at Carlow University where she ran the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops.