The Open Door Readings: September

The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students. September's Open Door Reading presents Columbia College's Lisa Fishman and her student Thomas Mowe along with Northwestern University's Averill Curdy and her student Ashley Keyser.

Influenced by the British Romantic poets and the pastoral tradition, Lisa Fishman composes haunting poems that explore the movement of mind and memory. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Dear, Read (2002), The Happiness Experiment (2007), and Current (2010). Fishman and her husband, along with poet Richard Meier, run a 12-acre “Poetry Farm” in southern Wisconsin, offering summer internships for poets that exchange accommodations for farm labor. Fishman has taught at Beloit College and Columbia College Chicago.

Thomas Mowe writes poems, letters and plays in Portland, OR. His work has appeared in many journals, including 1001,  and With + Stand. His first chapbook is Michael, Move In With Me (bedouin books). His professional achievements include teaching Nietzsche to children and Peewee Herman to adults.

Averill Curdy co-edited, with Lynne McMahon, The Longman Anthology of Poetry (2006). She has won the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writing Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Council for the Arts. She has also won a Lannan Writing Residency Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and The New England Review. She lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.

Ashley Keyser graduated from Northwestern University and the University of Florida, and she volunteered with the Peace Corps in Ukraine for several years. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Best New Poets 2015, and elsewhere.