ROB HALPERN is the author of Rumored Place (Krupskaya 2004), Disaster Suites (Palm Press 2009), and most recently, Music for Porn (Nightboat Books 2011). Ugly Duckling Presse will publish Common Place in 2015. Together with Taylor Brady, Halpern also co-authored the book length poem Snow Sensitive Skin (Displaced Press 2011). His work has been translated into French and Montenegrin, and most recently, Disaster Suites was translated into Dutch as Rampensuites as part of the Contemporary Poetry in Translation series published by the literary arts foundation, Perdu. Halpern is also an essayist and translator. Recent critical essays on topics ranging from Charles Baudelaire and George Oppen, to New Narrative and Conceptual Writing appear in Journal of Narrative Theory, Modernist Cultures, The Claudius App, and Chicago Review. He is also translating Georges Perec’s early essays on aesthetics and politics, which can be found in various publications, including Review of Contemporary Fiction and Paul Revere’s Horse, and will appear as a collection in 2016 (Nightboat Books). He lives in San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he teaches at Eastern Michigan University and Huron Valley Women’s Correctional Facility.
Rob Halpern will be joined by Graduate Student Poets Kevin Holden and Josh Stanley.
KEVIN HOLDEN is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which are SOLAR (which won the 2014 Fence Modern Poets Prize) and BIRCH (which won the 2014 Ahsahta Prize). His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Conjunctions, The New Yorker, jubilat, Colorado Review, TYPO, and Denver Quarterly. His work is also forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn Press). He also translates poetry from French, German, and Russian.
JOSH STANLEY has been living since 1987 and is the author of the chapbooks Contranight Escha Black, Rad Glucose and Glogy. Recent poems have appeared in The Claudius App, Damn the Caesars, Half Circle and Hi Zero. He used to edit the magazine Hot Gun!. He is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Yale studying Romantic poetry and is currently working for UNITE HERE in New Haven.