Open Door Series: Jenny Boully & Sara Wainscott

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 Jenny Boully and student Lily Someson, and Sara Wainscott and student Zachary Swezy.

Jenny Boully is the author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life (Coffee House Press). Her previous books include not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (Tarpaulin Sky Press), and The Books of Beginnings and Endings: Essays (Sarabande Books), [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press). Her chapbook of prose, Moveable Types, was released by Noemi Press. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Next American Essay, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, and other places. She teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and at Bennington College's MFA in Writing program.

Sara Wainscott is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Insecurity System, winner of the 2019 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize from Persea Books, and a chapbook, Queen of the Moon (dancing girl press, 2017). She appears on the Newcity “Lit 50 2017” list of people who promote literature in Chicago, where she is an adjunct poetry instructor in the MFA program at Roosevelt University.

Lily Someson is a queer poet and essayist living in Chicago. She is currently an undergraduate poetry major at Columbia College Chicago where she is an editor of Columbia Poetry Review, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Court Green Journal, Hooligan Magazine, Ransack Press, and Queeriosity (Young Chicago Authors) among others. She is currently writing a book of poetry on incarceration, fatherhood, tenderness, and the black body in America.

Zachary Arvind Swezy is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist living in Chicago. He will be graduating from the Creative Writing MFA at Roosevelt University this spring. His work has been published or featured in Paper Magazine, Southside Weekly, Neon Pajamas, Allied Forces Press, and on 1833.FM among others. He is currently writing a novel about graffiti artists living on a neoliberal capitalist hell island/reality television experiment.