Join Lesley MFA alums July Westhale (Poetry, June 2013) and Michael Mercurio (Poetry, January 2017) for an online zoom reading with poet Lauren Camp to celebrate her new book launch for Took House.

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Slice, DIAGRAM and other journals. Honors include the Dorset Prize, a fellowship from the Black Earth Institute, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish and Arabic. In 2020, she was selected to be one of 100 artists and storytellers for 100 Offerings of Peace. www.laurencamp.com

Michael Mercurio lives and writes in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where he serves on the steering committee for the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival (formerly the Amherst Poetry Festival.) Michael’s poems have appeared in Palette Poetry, Sugar House Review, Crab Creek Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His criticism has appeared in the Lily Poetry Review and Coal Hill Review. In addition, Michael is on the board of Faraday Publishing, a non-profit press with the mission of amplifying historically marginalized voices. He’s never met a Miniature Schnauzer he didn’t like.

July Westhale is an essayist, translator, and the award-winning author of Trailer Trash, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called “stunning” in a starred review. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. She also has an inventively-named collection of salty chapbooks. www.julywesthale.com