The Open Door Readings: April
61 West Superior Street
Free Admission
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. April's Open Door Reading presents Northwestern University's Averill Curdy and her student Lauren Schlesinger along with Concordia University’s Peter Kahn and his student Asia Calcagno.
Averill Curdy 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. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and The New England Review. Curdy wrote the book of poetry Song and Error (2013) and co-edited, with Lynne McMahon, The Longman Anthology of Poetry (2006). She lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.
Lauren Schlesinger is a graduate of the Northwestern University English-Writing program with Honors in Poetry and a graduate of the Northwestern University Master of Science in Education program. In 2009, she completed Safekeeping, an honors manuscript about the art of collection and miniatures, under the direction of Averill Curdy. Lauren is a past winner of the American Academy of Poets Jean Aloe Meyer Prize and a recipient of the Northwestern University Alumnae Graduate Fellowship. For the past five years, she has taught English and creative writing in the suburbs of Chicago.
Peter Kahn is a founding member of the London poetry collective Malika’s Kitchen. A high school teacher since 1994, Peter co-founded the London Teenage Poetry Slam, and as a Visiting Fellow, he recently launched the Spoken Word Education Training Programme at Goldsmiths-University of London, as well as a similar program at Concordia University-Chicago. He is currently a full-time spoken word educator at Oak Park/River Forest High School, where he runs the largest school-based program of its kind. Along with Patricia Smith and Ravi Shankar, he is the co-editor of the Golden Shovel Anthology honoring Gwendolyn Brooks.
Asia Calcagno, is a poet, performer, activist, and educator from Chicago. She has been a finalist of Louder Than A Bomb Youth Poetry Competition and her poems have been awarded the Benjamin T. Marshall Poetry Prize, the Charles B. Palmer Poetry Prize, and the Hemingway Award. Her work has been featured on Vocalo and Guess Radio and in Glass Mountain, Youth Voice Nation, and Women in RedZINE. Over the years Calcagno has created youth poetry education programs at non-profits and after school programs in both New London and Chicago, where she currently teaches high school English and composition. Her debut chapbook is titled Where We Take Our Guns.