Jake Schepers, Trish Hartland, and Kim Swendson are combining their first MFA poetry reading with an art exhibition Friday April 20. They are reading/performing as a part of the local Homebody series, hosted by Myles Robertson at his home, 620 Clinton Ave in South Bend. Doors open at 7pm for exploring the artwork made in collaboration between MFA-ers and other artists. The readings will be 8-9:30pm and include three MFA poets and local poet Sade Lanay. The event is free and open to the public, and donations for the host are encouraged. The event is also BYOB.
Here's the series website if you're curious- they're all about merging the local art scene into the community: https://www.homebodyhouseconcertfest.com/
They typically do house concerts but are broadening the scope of the series, hence bringing in poetry/art!
Bios for the MFA readers:
Patricia Hartland went to Hampshire College for a BA in Comparative Literature and Poetry, and just earned an MFA from the Iowa Translation Workshop where she translated poetry, prose, and theatre from French, Martinican, and sometimes Hindi/Urdu. Her thesis was a critical introduction and translation of Shenaz Patel’s The Silence of Chagos, a polyphonic fiction of reportage. She is currently basking in Hélène Cixous’ Manna, which is a conjuration of dissipated self-borders and actioned poetics—residues of word alchemy that make her excited to try writing, too.
Jacob Schepers is a graduate of Calvin College and the University at Buffalo. He is also a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame and holds a graduate minor in the History and Philosophy of Science. His interests include lyric theory, elegy, embodied cognition and performance, and the role of science and technology in poetry. While completing his MA at the University at Buffalo, he was a winner of the 2013 Outriders Poetry Project Competition for his book, A Bundle of Careful Compromises, published by Outriders in 2014. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PANK, Verse, Dream Pop, The Destroyer, and The Common, among others.
Kimberly Swendson is a Colorado native poet with roots in Santa Fe, NM where she has lived seasonally for six years. There she managed a local biodynamic, organic produce business for Mesa Top Farm cultivating heritage vegetables and working as a cattle hand. She also owns and operates a small kennel, Mesa Top Berners, breeding show-quality Bernese Mountain Dogs. As recent graduate of CU Boulder, Baby, served as her honors thesis and first major collection of poetry, which can be found online at homeofbaby.wordpress.com. Her poetic interests include translation, domesticity and space, and lyric’s place in contemporary writing. In the not too distant future, she hopes to pursue routes in publishing and PhD work in contemporary Italian literature.