Open Door Series: Rivka Yeker & Chris Green

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. This month’s reading features Rivka Yeker and her student Lora Mathis, and Chris Green and his student Christopher Watkins.

Rivka Yeker is the cofounder and managing editor of Hooligan Magazine. She is also a bookseller, freelance publicist, writer, and event coordinator. They have had work published in Women & Film, Vagabond City Lit, and Maudlin House, and released a micro chapbook through Ghost City Press.

Chris Green, author of The Sky Over Walgreens, Epiphany School, and Résumé, has had poetry published in Poetry, The New York Times, Court Green, Prairie Schooner, and Columbia Poetry Review. He’s edited four anthologies, including I Remember: Chicago Veterans of War. He teaches in the English Department at DePaul University.

Lora Mathis, a visual artist and poet based in San Diego, examines the ways we internalize the social myths of oppressive systems; they treat art and writing as sites for unlearning these systems and healing from them. Lora has published two collections of poetry, The Women Widowed to Themselves and Instinct to Ruin, and has shown work in London, Montreal, Chicago, New York, and LA, among other cities.

Christopher Watkins attends DePaul University's graduate program in writing and publishing where he’s learned from master poets Chris Green and Richard Jones. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Motley and Poetry East.