Poets Bethany Schultz and Jonathan Travelstead will share their work at the Salt Lake City Public Library. This event is part of the City Art Series.

Bethany Schultz Hurst is the author of Miss Lost Nation (Anhinga, 2014), which won the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her work has been selected to appear in Best American Poetry 2015 and has appeared in journals such as Crab Orchard, Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, New Orleans Review, and River Styx. She lives in Pocatello, Idaho, where she teaches creative writing at Idaho State University.

Winner of the 2013 Cobalt Poetry Prize for his poem “Trucker,” Jonathan Travelstead has compiled an astounding collection of adrenalized poetry. How We Bury Our Dead is a narrative work which follows a single speaker as he jumps from one intense situation to the next in order to avoid his mother’s struggle with cancer. An Air Force firefighter, he volunteers to accompany his unit to Kuwait, and, after returning and still unable to cope, he hitchhikes his way across Alaska before finally going home. Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a fulltime firefighter for the city of Murphysboro. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he now works on an old dirt-bike he hopes will one day get him to Peru.

This event is made possible with support from the Salt Lake City Public Library, Utah Humanities, and City Art.