Happy Friday, everyone!
On Monday (May 5), join Prof. Chris Solís Green and Prof. Richard Jones for a poetry reading from new poetry books! This reading will be held in in the Arts & Letters Hall (2315 N. Kenmore Ave.), Rm. 310, and will start at 6:30 PM. Read the poster below for full details!
(We’ll add this event to our Week 6 list!)
Chris Solís Green is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence in the English Department at DePaul University. He is the author of five books of poetry: The Sky Over Walgreens, Epiphany School, Résumé, Everywhere West, and The Dead Zoo (Bee Box Press, 2025). His poems have appeared in such publications as Poetry and The New York Times. He is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books whose mission is to disseminate, free of charge, works of writing by and about Chicagoans whose voices might not otherwise be heard. He is also the founding editor of the annual anthology, DePaul’s Blue Book: Best American High School Writing.
Prof. Green has edited four anthologies, including I Remember: Chicago Veterans of War, American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans, and Chicago Mosaic: Immigrant Stories of Objects Kept, Lost, or Left Behind (Big Shoulders Books, 2023).
More information can be found at www.chrissolisgreen.com.
Richard Jones has edited Poetry East for 44 years. The first volume of Poetry East was published in 1980; in 2020, Poetry East celebrated 40 years of publication with its 100th issue. In the spring of 2024, a special volume devoted to the art of Claude Monet will be published. As the Small Press Review proclaims, “anyone accustomed to Richard Jones’s Poetry East comes to expect excellence with every issue.” Poetry East is not merely a journal, but truly a series of book-length anthologies. Over the years, Jones has curated such volumes as Bliss, The Last Believer in Words, Wider than the Sky, and Origins, in addition to a series devoted to the world’s great cities, including Paris, London, Kyoto, Rome, Barcelona, and Chicago. Jones also edits the free worldwide poetry app, “The Poet’s Almanac.”
When asked why he has dedicated his life to poetry, Prof. Jones compares himself to the last believer in words: “I believe in things that take a long time to make, like trees and books.” When asked about his teaching, he says, “Writing poetry can be a hard and humbling discipline—an art that demands great erudition and mastery, and which tests the will and the imagination. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke framed the challenge of poetry: ‘You must change your life.’ And so poetry assaults complacency, insensitivity, and arrogance. Ordinary wisdom tells us to hurry blindly through our day; poetry asks that we slow down, listen, and regard all that which is marvelous, both the insignificant as well as the divine.”
Prof. Jones is the author of many books of poems, including Country of Air, At Last We Enter Paradise, A Perfect Time, 48 Questions, The Blessing, Apropos of Nothing, and The Correct Spelling & Exact Meaning. His most recent books are Stranger on Earth, Avalon, Paris, and The Minor Key. Anthologized in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems and Billy Collins’s Poetry 180, his poems have been featured on National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and The Writer’s Almanac. He is a professor of English at DePaul University. Visit his personal website at richardjonespoetry.com/.
