Local Queer Authors Reading: Groshek, Milks, and Wetlaufer

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Amy E. Groshek holds an MFA from the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Amy’s work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Contrary, Bloom, and Fence. Her chapbook, Shin Deep, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008.

Shin Deep is a chapbook of confessional poems and dramatic monologues set at the tail end of the Farm Crisis. The poems focus on family relations and the relationships farmers have with the land and with animals. The Duodenum Songs is a book-length series of dialogues between the work’s semiautobiographical butch protagonist referred to as The Slit and her diseased intestines, which speak with the voice of John Berryman’s Henry. Henry and The Slit labor, date, and travel through the lush, impoverished landscapes of the upper Midwest, manifesting a visceral dialectic on misogyny, ambition, abuse, loneliness, love, and the will to live.

Megan Milks is the author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, winner of the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award finalist; as well as three chapbooks, most recently The Feels, an exploration of fan fiction and affect. Milks edited The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, 2011-2013 and co-edited Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives. They currently teach creative writing at Beloit College.

Kill Marguerite and Other Stories collects thirteen stories that reimagine 90s-era queer girl adolescence using an array of experimental tactics including avant-pop, fan fiction, the comedic grotesque, conceptual theater, queer body horror, and new wave fabulism. The jewel at its center is a two-part twinned series featuring Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield of Sweet Valley Twins.

Valerie Wetlaufer is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first book of poetry, Mysterious Acts by My People won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Valerie holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah, an MFA in Poetry from Florida State University, and an MA in Teaching from Bennington College. She lives in Cedar Rapids, IA.

Call Me by My Other Name is a fierce, unforgettable book about bodies and desire. Told in three voices—two historical figures, and a meta-poetic third voice that connects past to present—Wetlaufer’s story weaves a brutal narrative of how we are taught to masquerade queer gender and yearning. Deeply affecting, the inventive language of these crucial, well-crafted poems transports at the same time as it transcends, embracing ambiguity, balancing intimacy and reserve. This much-anticipated second book by the Lambda Award-winning writer demonstrates that poetry, at its best, is capable of deliverance.