Des Moines Area Community College recently issued the following announcement.
The event is being held virtually this year
- Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems from Alice James Books.
- Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels, The Slowdown and Poetry Unbound.
The Annual DMACC Celebration of Literary Arts, now in its 19th year, will be held virtually again this year. Local, regional and national authors will read from their works during weekly, one-hour events held online via Zoom. All events are free and open to the public.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems from Alice James Books: “Mezzanines," which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, “Contradictions in the Design" and “Constellation Route." His writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity and elsewhere. He's been awarded fellowships from the Kresge Arts Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the MacDowell Colony.
Olzmann teaches at Dartmouth College and in the Master's in Fine Arts (MFA) degree program at Warren Wilson College.
Dilruba Ahmed is the author of “Bring Now the Angels" (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Her debut book of poetry, “Dhaka Dust" (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review and Ploughshares. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin's) and elsewhere.
Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review's Editors' Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers. She has taught with Chatham University's MFA Program and Hugo House in Seattle, and joined the faculty at Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers in January 2021.
To attend the readings by Olzmann and Ahmed, go to the following Zoom link: https://DMACC.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_v4f2vhXxRrSHPOGs3zZO-A.
The Zoom meeting is free and open to the public.
For more on DMACC's Celebration of Literary Arts, contact Ankeny Campus Professor and Celebration of Literary Arts Coordinator Marc Dickinson at (515) 964-6221 or madickinson@dmacc.edu.
Selected Writings by Olzmann:
"Letter to the Person Who, During the Q&A Session After the Reading, Asked for Career Advice," https://waxwingmag.org/items/issue17/7_Olzmann-Letter-to-the-Person-Who-During-the-Q-A-Session-After-the-Reading-Asked-for-Career-Advice.php
"Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czeslaw Milosz," https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/149969/letter-beginning-with-two-lines-by-czesaw-miosz
"Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America," https://tinhouse.com/letter-to-the-person-who-carved-his-initials-into-the-oldest-living-longleaf-pine-in-north-america/
Selected Writings by Ahmed:
"Dhaka Dust," https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55253/dhaka-dust
"Serenade," https://poetrysociety.org/features/new-american-poets/dilruba-ahmed-selected-by-aimee-nezhukumatathil
"The Process," https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92389/the-process-589363fbd1dc9
Original source can be found here.