For Immediate Release
Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com
City Art Presents Utah Poet Laureate Lance Larsen and
Nebraska poet Steve Langan
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday April 22nd 7:00—9:00 P.M.
Utah Poet Laureate Lance Larsen and Nebraska poet Steve Langan
will read from their works Wednesday April 22nd at the Salt Lake Public Library at 7:00 P.M.
in the fourth floor conference room.
Lance Larsen’s fourth collection of
poems, Genius Loci, was
recently published by University of Tampa Press. His earlier collections
include Backyard Alchemy
(2009), In All Their Animal Brilliance
(2005), and Erasable Walls
(1998). He holds a PhD from the University of Houston. His work
appears widely, in such venues as Georgia Review, Southern Review,
Ploughshares, Poetry, River Styx, Orion, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best
American Poetry 2009, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has
twice made the Notable Essay list in Best American Essays. He is
currently working on Seventeen Ways to
Float, a collection of essays about place, family, and memory which
won 1st place in the 2011 Utah Original Writing Competition. He grew up
in Idaho and Colorado and lived in Chile for two years while serving an LDS
mission. He collects antiques, plays basketball, occasionally walks on
his hands, grows daylilies, hikes, and loves Indian and Thai food. He
sometimes collaborates with his wife, Jacqui Biggs Larsen, a painter and multi-media
artist. Since 1993 he has taught literature and creative writing at BYU,
where he currently serves as associate chair. He and Jacqui recently
directed a study abroad program in Madrid. In 2012, he was named to a
five-year term as Utah Poet Laureate.
Steve Langan was born in
Milwaukee and raised in Omaha. He earned degrees from the University of
Nebraska and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Langan is the author
of Freezing (2001), Notes on Exile and Other Poems (2005), Meet Me at the Happy Bar (2009),
and What It Looks Like, How It
Flies (2013).
In Prairie Schooner, Nicky Beer
wrote, “Though the landscapes of the poems are distinctly interior and
psychological, one cannot help but read this interior as a uniquely American
one. Much of the anomie and anxiety in Notes
on Exile and Other Poems seems to be the product of a culture
where rapture is trivialized by its proximity with the quotidian, and language
is often a treacherous, euphemistic subterfuge. Langan is clearly
developing his considerable gift to elegize the fragmented, desperate, and
soulful American poetic voice on the cusp of the twenty-first century.”
Reviewing for MAKE Magazine, Weston Cutter
noted, “What makes Langan’s Meet Me
at the Happy Bar stand so far out from other collections is
not just the whirligig zip and whiplash he causes by putting disparate lines
next to and on top of each other, nor the ache for some substantial meaning to
bedazzle all this flotsam onto, some foundation to leave the heaps upon. No,
what makes this all such a big deal is the explicit emphasis on now, on time.”
Langan teaches at the
University of Nebraska MFA in Writing program. He is founder and director of
the Seven Doctors Project, based in Omaha, in which area writers guide
healthcare workers in a writing workshop.
Most featured readings are followed by an open reading.
The
event is free and open to the public.
City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts
Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations.