Woodland Pattern x City Lights Publishers

On Friday, April 12th and Saturday, April 13th, 2024, Woodland Pattern will host two days of events featuring poets with recent collections from City Lights Publishers. This collaboration with City Lights will be presented as part of Woodland Pattern’s ongoing series, Visions in Publishing, made possible with support from the NEA. Programs will include two readings and a conversation featuring poets Will Alexander, Roberto Harrison, Evan Kennedy, and mimi tempestt, with all events hosted and moderated by Garrett Caples, poet and editor of the City Lights Spotlight series. All events will take place on site at Woodland Pattern, and be livestreamed via Crowdcast.

Readings will take place on Friday, April 12th at 7 pm, featuring Evan Kennedy and mimi tempestt; and on Saturday, April 13th at 7 pm, featuring Will Alexander and Roberto Harrison. On Saturday, April 13th at 2 pm, all four poets, along with moderator Garrett Caples, will take part in a conversation about histories of small press publishing and bookstores as sites of community gathering, among other topics.

About the artists: 

Will Alexander has published over two dozen books in a variety of genres and has earned many honors and awards including a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry, a California Arts Council Fellowship, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and the 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize. He has also exhibited his artwork in group and solo shows. His work is known for its visionary, oracular surrealism and the influence of Negritude. Among his publications are Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) (City Lights, 2022), Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021/Granta, 2022), which was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, The Combustion Cycle (Roof, 2021), Across the Vapor Gulf (New Directions, 2017), and The Sri Lankan Loxodrome (New Directions, 2009). His book Compression & Purity (2011) was volume five in the City Lights Spotlight Poetry Series. He is currently the poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. He has lived his entire life in Los Angeles.

Roberto Harrison‘s poetry books include Isthmus to Abya Yala (City Lights, 2024), Tropical Lung: exi(s)t(s) (Omnidawn, 2021), Tropical Lung: Mitologia Panameña (Nion Editions, 2020), Yaviza (Atelos, 2017), Bridge of the World (Litmus Press, 2017), culebra (Green Lantern Press, 2016), bicycle (Noemi Press, 2015), Counter Daemons (Litmus Press, 2006), Os (subpress, 2006), as well as many chapbooks. With Andrew Levy, Harrison edited the poetry journal Crayon from 1997 to 2008. He was also the editor of Bronze Skull Press which published over 20 chapbooks, including the work of many Midwestern poets. Most recently, Harrison served as a co-editor for the Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology. He was the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2017–2019, received a Wisconsin Notable Author award from the Wisconsin Library Association in 2022, and is also a visual artist. He lives in Milwaukee with his wife, the poet Brenda Cárdenas.

Evan Kennedy is a poet and bicyclist. He is the author of Metamorphoses (City Lights, 2023), I Am, Am I, to Trust the Joy That Joy Is No More or Less There Now Than Before (Roof Books), Jerusalem Notebook (O’clock Press), The Sissies (Futurepoem), Terra Firmament (Krupskaya), Shoo-Ins to Ruin (Gold Wake Press), and Us Them Poems (Book*hug). He runs the occasional press, Dirty Swan Projects, and was born in Beacon, New York, in 1983. He lives in San Francisco, California.

mimi tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and daughter of California. She has a M.A. in Literature from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Creative/Critical Ph.D. in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, the monumental misrememberings, was published with Co-Conspirator Press//The Feminist Center for Creative Work in 2020, and the delicacy of embracing spirals was published by City Lights in 2023. In 2021, she was selected for participation in the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices & Writers, and was a Creative Fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco. Her works can be found in Foglifter, Interim Poetics, and at the Studio Museum in Harlem. A native of Los Angeles, she currently resides in Berkeley, CA.

Garrett Caples is a poet, journalist, and poetry editor at City Lights Books. He curates the City Lights Spotlight Poetry Series. He is the author of numerous books of poetry which include Complications, Power Ballads, Retrievals, Lovers of Today, The Garrett Caples Reader, amongst others. Together with Andrew Joron and Nancy Peters he edited The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia.

About City Lights Booksellers & Publishers:

Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture’s only “Literary Landmark.” Although it has been more than sixty years since tour buses with passengers eager to sight “beatniks” began pulling up in front of City Lights, the Beats’ legacy of anti-authoritarian politics and unconstrained intellectual curiosity continues to be a strong influence in the store, most evident in the selection of titles.

In 1955, two years after opening his paperback bookshop, Lawrence Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with the Pocket Poets Series. City Lights Publishers’ first volume was a collection of Ferlinghetti’s own poems, Pictures of the Gone World. Within a year City Lights had published its fourth and its most famous title, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, a book that revolutionized American poetry and American consciousness. City Lights has always been a champion of progressive thinking, fully committed to publishing works of both literary merit and social responsibility. With over 200 titles in print, we publish cutting-edge fiction, poetry, memoirs, literary translations and books on vital social and political issues.

For more information about Woodland Pattern Book Center, please visit: www.woodlandpattern.org

Additional photos available upon request.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.