Three highly original and accomplished American poets, still in the formative phases of their writing careers, will read from recent and upcoming collections. The evening will be conducted by Michael Braziller, publisher of Persea Books, a literary press he co-founded in 1975. After the reading, Mr. Braziller and his guests will discuss how they discovered poetry and first started writing. Whose voices and what current sounds influenced this new generation of writers? What established notions and aesthetics were rejected, and which new ones embraced to help shape their poetic voices? From familial and ethnic history to the spoken word of the street, from pop culture and the music of hip hop and jazz to the formal training of literary scholarship, these three poets will explore the forces that inform their work today.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Stegner fellowship in Poetry, a Jones Lectureship in Poetry at Stanford University, and a Rona Jaffe Woman Writers' Award. Her poem, "Circus Fire, 1944," received The Paris Review Bernard F. Conners Prize. Her first collection, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, was published by Persea Books in 2005 and won the Connecticut Book Award. It was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award . Ms. Calvocoressi teaches in the MFA program at California College of Arts in San Francisco and in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College. Her second collection, Apocalyptic Swing, is forthcoming from Persea Books.

A. Van Jordan is the author of Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was selected for the Book of the Month Club from the Academy of American Poets. His second book, M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, was awarded an Anisfield-Wolf Award and listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times. Mr. Jordan was awarded a Whiting Writers Award in 2005 and a Pushcart Prize in 2006, and is a recent recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. His latest book, Quantum Lyrics, was published July 2007. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, and serves on faculty of the MFA program at Warren Wilson College.

Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections,Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Asian American Writers' Workshop Members' Choice Award, and My American Kundiman, which won the Global Filipino Literary Award. His chapbook, Uncommon Denominators, won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina. His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including Indiana Review, The Literary Review, North American Review, Columbia, and The Beacon Best. His work has been honored by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, and Best of the Net. He is currently Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at The University of Texas at Austin.

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