The English Department is pleased to invite you to participate in the Lake Forest Literary Festival that will take place from Monday, February 9 through Thursday, February 12. The theme of this year’s festival is poetry off the page: we have an exciting line-up of writers whose work pushes the poetic envelope through multimedia, computer programming, pure sound performance, and social critique, including our first Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Resident Jessica Savitz.

Presenter Biographies

Christian Bök is a sound poet and conceptual artist who teaches at the University of Calgary. His books include a treatise on ‘pataphysics, the imaginary science invented by French surrealist Alfred Jarry; Crystallography, a book of poems; and the remarkable Eunoia, a prose-poetry hybrid that has been a bestseller in Canada and won the Griffin Prize, one of Canada’s highest literary honors. It has just been published in the United Kingdom and is climbing the bestseller charts there. He is one of two Artists-in-Residence at Lake Forest College this semester.

Jessica Savitz is the first recipient of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize. She received a $10,000 stipend and will be in residence at the College for two months. She won the prize for her first book of poems, Hunting Is Painting, which will be published by Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books. She lives in Chicago.

Stephanie Strickland is a print and hypermedia poet, many of whose works can be experienced online at her website. Critic Marjorie Perloff has said of her work, “Stephanie Strickland is one of contemporary poetry’s polymaths: her poetry displays an astonishing command of scientific knowledge—for instance Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem—technical know-how, especially in the realm of electronic poetics, and unusual verbal virtuosity. The pièce de résistance in Zone : Zero is the interactive generative Flash poem “slippingglimpse,” in which text and video, made by using motion capture coding, combine so as to create a genuinely new and distinctive eco-poetry. Readers/viewers will find themselves totally mesmerized.” She lives in New York City.

Gnoetry is a poetry collective conducting “an on-going experiment in human/computer collaborative poetry composition.” Its members,Eric Elshtain, Matthias Regan, John Tipton, and Jon Trowbridge,  all live and work in Chicago. Elshtain, Regan, and Tipton are poets and translators who have been variously published in such journals asChicago Review, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, Notre Dame Review,New American Writing, Skanky Possum, Denver Quarterly. John Tipton has had two books published by Flood Editions (a Chicago-based press): a book of poems titled Surfaces and a translation of Sophocles’ Ajax. Regan and Elshtain have published several chapbooks, and Elshtain also has had a full-length collection, Here in Premonition, published by RubbaDucky Press (a Chicago/Brooklyn joint venture). Both Elshtain and Regan run small poetry presses of their own in Chicago. Jon Trowbridge is a software engineer for Google, and is the author of the Gnoetry poetry generating software from which the group takes its name.

Brian Teare is the author of the poetry collections The Room Where I Was Born and the forthcoming Sight Map, to be published as part of the University of California Press’ New California Poetry Series. He lives in San Francisco.

Karen Leona Anderson is a poet and assistant professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland with a particular interest in the intersections between poetry and science. She has published widely in journals and her first book, Punish Honey, is forthcoming from Carolina Wren Press.

Richard Greenfield is the author of the widely acclaimed poetry collection A Carnage in the Love-trees, published by University of California Press; his second book, Tracer, is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing. He is an assistant professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln.