Please join us for a joint poetry reading with Kent Shaw and Oliver de la Paz! Both will be reading from their newly published books.
Too Numerous by Kent Shaw
"What does it really mean when people are viewed as bytes of data? And is there beauty or an imaginative potential to information culture and the databases cataloguing it? As Too Numerous reveals, the raw material of bytes and data points can be reshaped and repurposed for ridiculous, melancholic, and even aesthetic purposes. Grappling with an information culture that is both intimidating and daunting, Kent Shaw considers the impersonality represented by the continuing accumulation of personal information and the felicities--and barriers--that result: The us that was inside us was magnificent structures. And they weren't going to grow any larger"
Kent Shaw is a graduate from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where he earned my PhD. In 2003 he received his MFA from Washington University. Before his schooling, he was a Petty Officer 2nd Class (eventually) in the United States Navy, a technical writer and a day trader. He has published two books. His first book, Calenture, was published in 2008 by University of Tampa Press, and his second, Too Numerous, was awarded the 2018 Juniper Prize, published just recently by the University of Massachusetts Press. For five years, he taught at West Virginia State University. And for the past three years he has taught at Wheaton College in Norton, MA.
The Boy in the Labyrinth by Oliver de la Paz
In a long sequence of prose poems, questionnaires, and standardized tests, The Boy in the Labyrinth interrogates the language of autism and the language barriers between parents, their children, and the fractured medium of science and school.
Oliver de la Paz is the author of five collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth. He also co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A founding member, Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as The Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Poetry. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.