Voices in the Valley Reading Series presents Dan Beachy-Quick, Patricia Kirkpatrick, Benjamin Garcia, Kathryn Cowles, & Allison Adair

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His books include Variations on Dawn and Dusk, which was longlisted for the National Book Awards. His work has been supported by the Lannan, Monfort, and Guggenheim Foundations. He is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Colorado State University, where he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.

Patricia Kirkpatrick is the author of Blood Moon as well as Odessa, which was awarded the first Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry and the 2013 Minnesota Book Award. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Loft Literary Center, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She has taught writing at many colleges, most recently in the University of Minnesota MFA program. She lives in Saint Paul.

Benjamin Garcia’s first collection of poems, Thrown in the Throat, was selected for the 2019 National Poetry Series by Kazim Ali. He currently works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

Kathryn Cowles is the author of Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World and Eleanor, Eleanor, Not Your Real Name, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. She earned her doctorate from the University of Utah and is an associate professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison Adair now lives in Boston, where she teaches at Boston College and GrubStreet. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals; and have been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition. She is the author of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize-winning collection, The Clearing, forthcoming June 2020.

Arra Lynn Ross is the author of Seedlip and Sweet Apple and Day of the Child, forthcoming in November 2021.