Laura Wetherington (Of After Poems, Translation, and Birds)

Of Poetry Podcast

Read: "Dear Hannah," and other poems

Laura Wetherington’s first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books 2011), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. The Brooklyn Rail called the book “humble, folksy, romantic, tough, inventive, and not over-programmed.” Her second book, Parallel Resting Places, was chosen by Peter Gizzi for the New Measure Prize, was released with Free Verse Editions in January 2021. She has published three chapbooks: Dick Erasures (Red Ceilings Press 2011), the collaboratively written at the intersection of 3 (Dancing Girl Press 2014), and Grief Is the Only Thing That Flies (Bateau Press 2018), which Arielle Greenberg selected for the Keel Chapbook Contest. Her poem “No one wants to be the victim no one when there is a gun involved and blue” was adapted as an artist book by Inge Bruggeman.

Her poetry appears in Narrative, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, FENCE, VOLT, Anomaly (Drunken Boat), among others, and in three anthologies: Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books 2020), The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books 2012), and 60 Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014). Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The Volta, Hyperallergic, Full Stop, Jacket2, and 1508.

Laura co-founded and, for a decade, co-edited textsound.org: an online journal of experimental poetry and sound. Poets & Writers named textsound an “indie innovator,” one of a small group of “groundbreaking presses and magazines that are redrawing the publishing map.” She developed an integrated curriculum for graduate and undergraduate students working on the Sierra Nevada Review and for four years taught those classes. In 2014 she joined Baobab Press as their poetry editor.

Wetherington is a graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA program, UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate English Department, and Cabrillo College. She has taught for the French Ministry of Education, the University of Michigan, the New England Literature Program, Eastern Michigan University, Sierra Nevada University’s Humanities Department and Low-Residency MFA Program, and for the Nevada Arts Council’s writers in the schools program. She currently teaches creative writing at Amsterdam University College and with the International Writers’ Collective. Grants include a 2017 & 2015 Artist Fellowship in Literary Arts from the Nevada Arts Council and a 2014 Artist Grant in Literature from the Sierra Arts Foundation. She has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Camac.

Purchase: Laura Wetherington's Parallel Resting Places (Parlor Press, 2021)

And the two collections Laura reads from on Episode 8:

Milla Van der Have's Ghosts of Old Virginny

Mustafa Stitou's Two Half Faces