The Length of This Gap Tour ~ Seattle
Kristen E. Nelson is taking her new collection of poetry, the length of this gap, on the road. In Seattle, Kristen will be joined by Rebecca Brown, Deborah Poe, Kristiana Kahakauwila, and TC Tolbert.
Rebecca Brown is the author of Not Heaven, Somewhere Else (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2018) and a dozen titles published in the US and abroad, including American Romances, The Last Time I Saw You, The Dogs, The Terrible Girls (all with City Lights Books), and The Gifts of the Body (HarperCollins). She been awarded The Boston Book Review Award, The Lambda Literary Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, two Washington State Book Awards, and a Stranger Genius Award, as well as grants to MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Hawthornden Castle, and The Breneman-Jaech Foundation. Her altered texts and installations have been exhibited in the Frye Art Museum, Hedreen Gallery, Arizona Center for Poetry, Simon Fraser Gallery (Vancouver, BC) and Shoreline Art Gallery. Her work has appeared in magazines and journals in the US, UK, and Japan, and her books have been translated into Japanese, German, Dutch, Norwegian, and Italian.
Kristiana Kahakauwila is a hapa writer of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian), German and Norwegian extract. Her first book, This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth, 2013), takes as its heart the people and landscapes of contemporary Hawai'i. Kristiana is the 2015-16 Lisa Goldberg Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, where she is working on a multi-generational novel about water and native rights on the island of Maui. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University and has served as faculty at the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Oregon State University-Cascades. She has also taught at Chaminade University of Honolulu.
Kristen E. Nelson is a queer writer, performer, activist, and community builder. She is the author of the length of this gap (Damaged Goods, August 2018) and two chapbooks: sometimes I gets lost and is grateful for noises in the dark (Dancing Girl, 2017) and Write, Dad (Unthinkable Creatures, 2012). Kristen is the founder of Casa Libre en la Solana, a non-profit writing center in Tucson, Arizona, where she worked as the Executive Director for 14 years. www.kristenenelson.com
Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections keep (forthcoming from Dusie Press), the last will be stone, too (Stockport Flats), Elements (Stockport Flats), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène (Furniture Press). Deborah also co-edited Between Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction and Criticism (Peter Lang). Her work has appeared in journals like Denver Quarterly, Court Green, Loose Change, Colorado Review, and Jacket2, and in anthologies such as Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women & Place and In/Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley. Her visual works—including video poems and handmade book objects—have been exhibited at Pace University (New York City), Casper College (Wyoming), Center for Book Arts (New York City), University of Arizona Poetry Center (Tucson), University of Pennsylvania Kelly Writers House at Brodsky Gallery (Philadelphia), and ONN/OF “a light festival” (Seattle), as well as online with Elective Affinities, Peep/Show, Trickhouse, The Volta, and Gramma.
TC Tolbert is a genderqueer, feminist poet and teacher committed to social justice. S/he believes in working across communities—building bridges wherever possible. Tolbert earned his MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona and teaches in the low residency MFA program at OSU-Cascades and teaches composition and transgender literature at University of Arizona. Awarded the Arizona Commission on the Arts Individual Artist Award in 2012 and a residency at Byrdcliffe, s/he has three chapbooks: spirare (Belladonna, 2012), territories of folding (Kore Press, 2011), and I:Not He:Not I (Pitymilk Press, 2014).Tolbert’s first full-length collection, Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press, 2014), was a three-time finalist for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. TC is co-editor, along with Trace Peterson, of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics (Nightboat Books 2013) the first anthology of its kind and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Anthology. Tolbert lives in Tucson.
Praise for the length of this gap:
One of the most powerful, breathtaking bodies of poetry fortifying the will to survive. I am an enormous fan of Kristen Nelson’s poems and am always excitedly anticipating the next poem showing me the better parts of our species and how to love and thrive! —CA Conrad
In the length of this gap, Kristen E. Nelson does the trembling work we so often try to avoid. Here she makes eye contact with the abyss – seeking to understand how we metamorphose in the moment of (and days, weeks, years following) inexplicable loss. This is a book of great courage, striving to put the world back together with long lists of what now is and can become. How thankful I am to have her and her work as my guide – she who dares to “wish to go back and walk through the wasps,” and returns full of “love and love with some commas.”—tc tolbert
Death is not always tragedy, but then again, neither is love – its encounter, its ennui, its wound. Kristen Nelson’s the length of this gap revels in passionate ambivalence, gliding between emotions without netted hearts to catch her fall. Oh foolish bravery! Sorrow becomes lust and lust becomes abandonment, and Nelson makes me want to be bolder, hotter, sexier – and I crave. These poems persuade my addiction. —Lily Hoang