The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature poets Brian Barker and Nicky Beer on Thursday, Oct. 20, at 7 p.m. in the John and Dede Howard Recital Hall of the Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts.
There will also be a question-and-answer session in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium of the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication earlier in the day, at 3:30 p.m.
The public is invited to both events. Admission is free.
Brian Barker is the author of “The Animal Gospels” (Tupelo Press, 2006) and “The Black Ocean” (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition. His poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Writer's Chronicle, The Washington Post, Blackbird, and Pleiades. His awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2009 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize from Sarah Lawrence College. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where he is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.
Nicky Beer is the author of “The Octopus Game” (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2015), winner of the 2016 Colorado Book Award for Poetry, and “The Diminishing House” (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2010), winner of the 2011 Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a fellowship and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, a Discovery/The Nation Award, and a Campbell Corner Prize. She is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor at the journal Copper Nickel.
Additional information about the series can be found online.
The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave., at the corner of Columbia Avenue and 10th Street. The Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts is located at 221 Columbia Ave., between Ninth and 10th streets.