Bankhead Presents: Keetje Kuipers and Jamie Quatro, Thursday 7:30 PM!

Mar 4, 2014Archive, News

Please join us at 7:30 PM at the University Club this Thursday (March 6), for a fantastic reading with fantastic snacks. Poet Keetje Kuipers and novelist Jamie Quatro will both have books available for sale, and there will be beautiful limited-edition broadsides from the Book Arts department. RSVP on Facebook .

Keetje Kuipers was born in Pullman, WA to a fishing guide and a sociologist. Since then, she’s lived in Idaho, Montana, Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, New York, Oregon, and Alabama. Writing directly to the themes of loneliness, longing, and loss, Kuipers’ first collection, Beautiful in the Mouth, contains, as The Rumpus put it, “pitch-perfect poems about topics that are expected in a poetry collection, but that are crafted so well that they transcend cliché to flower into these plainly beautiful chunks of text.” Still obsessed with restlessness and isolation, Kuipers second book, The Keys to the Jail, is due out from BOA Editions in April 2014. It contains poems that examine the crimes we commit against ourselves—our acts of faithlessness, and the redemption of returning home to the self we left behind. As Kuipers herself has said, “[Poems] are beautiful, necessary attempts, the same way that standing on top of a mountain and shouting your name into the uninhabited air is an attempt—we must declare ourselves over and over again, and still never really find a way to understand how we exist.”

Jamie Quatro’s debut collection, I Want To Show You More (Grove 2013), is a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, Indie Next pick, and New York Times Editors’ Choice. It was named a Top 10 Book of 2013 by Dwight Garner in the New York Times and a Favorite Book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker. The collection is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Georgia Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

Quatro’s work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, AGNI, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, she is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, as well as 2013 fellowships from both the Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. Her stories are anthologized in the O.Henry Prize Stories 2013, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and in the forthcoming 9th edition of The Story and Its Writer (ed. Ann Charters). Quatro holds graduate degrees from the College of William & Mary and the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and is a Contributing Editor at Oxford American magazine. She lives with her family in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.