Literary Bridges Reading series April 3, 2022

“April is National Poetry Month, and we have a great lineup to celebrate it,” says Stan Kusunoki, Co-host/curator of the Literary Bridges Reading Series. “Expect a variety of viewpoints and a bit of prose too—it’s a classic Literary Bridges lineup.”



The roster includes:



Jeanne Lutz grew up on a small dairy farm in southern Minnesota, attended the National University of Ireland Galway, and spent two years in Japan. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Best-of-the-Net nominee, and winner of the Loft Mentor Series for poetry, she is the author of the collection Until the Kingdom Comes. Jeanne divides her time between the family farm, giving tours at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and researching agrarian stewardship in Italy.



Sherry Quan Lee, MFA, University of Minnesota, is the author of Chinese Blackbird, a memoir in verse; How to Write a Suicide Note, serial essays that saved a woman’s life; Love Imagined: a mixed-race memoir (a Minnesota Book Award Finalist); and, the picture book And You Can Love Me a story for everyone who loves someone with ASD;—published by LHP, Modern History Press, Ann Arbor, MI. She is the editor of How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse, an anthology finding home in university writing classrooms: a five-year anniversary edition will be released July 2022. Her most recent book of poems, Septuagenarian, was published March 2021.



Chris Stark is a Native (Anishinaabe & Cherokee) award-winning writer, researcher, visual artist, and national and international speaker. Her second novel, Carnival Lights, is about two Ojibwe teen girls who leave their reservation for Minneapolis in 1969. Her first novel, Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation, was a Lambda Literary Finalist. Her essays, poems, academic writing, and creative non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including The Palgrave International Handbook on Trafficking, University of Pennsylvania Law Review; Dignity Journal; The WIP; Florida Review; The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prize-Winning Essays; When We Became Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience; Hawk and Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability; and many others. Her poem, "Momma's Song," was recorded by Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble as a double manga CD.



Keno Evol is a writer and arts organizer. He is the founder of the Black Table Arts cooperative, a pay what you can art co-op for black artists in Minnesota located in south Minneapolis. He is currently pursuing a degree in Ethnic Studies. He is editor of A Garden Of Black Joy: Global Poetry From The Edges of Liberation And Living. His work hones in on the literary arts and the black radical tradition as curriculum for the future. Evol has been published in Split This Rock, Radius Lit and Vinyl.

Evol has received the 2022 Minnesota Campus Compact Presidents' Student Leadership Award from the Institute for Community Engagement and Scholarship, the Verve Grant, the Beyond the Pure fellowship, The Emerging Writers Grant, and The Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for his work. His essays are available at MNArtists.com, through the Walker Art Center.



Emilio DeGrazia, from Winona, has been active on the Minnesota writing scenes since 1970.  He was founder/editor of Great River Review literary journal and has authored several books of fiction, essays and poetry.  A collection of fiction, Enemy Country (New Rivers Press), was selected by Anne Tyler for a Writer’s Choice Award, and a novel, Billy Brazil (New Rivers Press), was chosen for a Minnesota Voices award. A second collection, Seventeen Grams of Soul, received a Minnesota Book Award in 1995.He and his wife Monica also have co-edited three anthologies of poetry and prose for Nodin Press of Minneapolis.  His latest book of poetry, also by Nodin Press, is titled What Trees Know.