Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumni Okwudili Nebeolisa & Jessica Laser will read from their poetry.

Okwudili Nebeolisa will read from Terminal Maladies, selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Prize.  “Nebeolisa’s debut, Terminal Maladies, introduces a poet so skillful and original that his book represents a vital moment in contemporary poetry. Centering around the loss of the poet’s mother, these poems match acute observation with abiding sympathy. Masterful with formal as well as free verse, Nebeolisa moves beyond mere technique… these are major poems. They will be with us for a long time to come.” — Peter Campion

Okwudili Nebeolisa was born in Kaduna, Nigeria.  His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Image, Salamander Magazine, Sewanee Review, and Threepenny Review, and his nonfiction has appeared in Catapult and Commonwealth Writers. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop where he was a Provost Fellow and won the Prairie Lights John Leggetts Prize for Fiction. He is currently an MFA student in fiction at the University of Minnesota where he is the recipient of a Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. He is a recipient of support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Granum Foundation, and the Center for the Art Crested Butte. He is currently a poetry editor at Post Road Magazine.

Jessica Laser will read from The Goner School, a Kuhl House Poetry selection. “Jessica Laser’s The Goner School is a beautifully uncanny book about, ultimately, knowledge: the rituals by which we exchange it and the alchemy by which it passes into wisdom. These poems will sharpen your intellect, tutor your senses, and enlarge your vision of your own life.”—Maggie Millner

Jessica Laser was born and raised in Chicago. She is the author of two previous books of poems, Planet Drill (Futurepoem Books, 2022), winner of the Other Futures Award, and Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019), as well as the chapbooks Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience (Catenary Press, 2015), and He That Feareth Every Grass Must Not Piss in a Meadow (paradigm press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Hyperallergic, the Iowa Review, jubilat, and Typo. She holds degrees from Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is completing a PhD in English at The University of California, Berkeley.  She teaches at Claremont McKenna College, and lives in Los Angeles, California.