Open Door Series: Lisa Fishman & Jennifer Karmin

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. October's reading features Lisa Fishman and Leif Haven, and Jennifer Karmin and the Borderless Poets Collective.

Lisa Fishman is the author of seven books, the newest of which–Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition–will be released next September on Wave Books. Her most recent collections are 24 Pages and other poems (Wave Books, 2015) and several titles on Ahsahta Press such as F L O W E R  C A R T; The Happiness Experiment; and Dear, Read. Fishman’s work is anthologized in Best American Experimental Poetry 2014, edited by Cole Swenson for Omnidawn; The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta); Not For Mothers Only (Fence Books); and elsewhere. Recent poems and prose appear in new or forthcoming issues of Denver Quarterly, 6x6, SplitLevel Journal, among others. Fishman has taught full-time at Columbia College Chicago since 2006 and was formerly Director of the BA and MFA Poetry Programs. A US–Canadian writer with roots in Montréal, she is currently working on a collection of stories.

Jennifer Karmin’s multidisciplinary writing has transpired at festivals, artist-run spaces, and on city streets across the U.S., Cuba, Japan, Kenya, and Europe. Her performances have been featured at venues such as the Poetry Project, the Walker Art Center, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and Woodland Pattern Book Center. As a founding curator of the Red Rover Series, she has often devised large-scale ensembles of writers improvising together. Widely published in poetry anthologies and journals, her books include the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice and The Sexual Organs of the IRS a collaboration with Bernadette Mayer. She has been a Visiting Writer at Naropa University, Oberlin College, California Institute of the Arts, plus a myriad of sites. Since 2000 she has worked with immigrants and refugees at Truman College in the Adult Education Program, using creative writing to support literacy.

Leif Haven is a poet and creative technologist focused on speculative futures, machine intelligence, and human computer collaboration. He’s based on Oakland, California.

Borderless Poets is a collective of immigrant and refugee students from the City Colleges of Chicago. They use their writing to knock down unnecessary walls.