The Open Door: Brett Foster and Srikanth Reddy

The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long reading features two Chicagoland college and graduate writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students.

Brett Foster is the author of two poetry volumes, The Garbage Eater (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011) and Fall Run Road, which was awarded Finishing Line Press's 2011 Open Chapbook Prize. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Boston Review, Cellpoems, Harvard Review, IMAGE, Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, The New Criterion, and Pleiades, among other journals. Foster has held a Stegner Fellowship in poetry and has received grants from the PEN American Center and the Illinois Arts Council. Recently he was awarded the Willis Barnstone Prize for translation and the Baltimore Review Poetry Prize. He teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Wheaton College, and regularly gives pre-show talks at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Dayna Clemens lives and writes with her husband, Mark, in Glen Ellyn. She works as a validation engineer, testing large automated machinery.

Srikanth Reddy grew up in Chicago. He earned an AB from Harvard College, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa, and a PhD in English literature from Harvard University. Reddy’s awards include fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Mellon Foundation. His poems have appeared in the anthologies Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (2004) and Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets (2004). Reddy is the literacy director for the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Trust in Bhimavaram, Andhra Pradesh, India. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Chicago.

Clara Mitchell is a graduate student studying religion and literature at the University of Chicago.