Literary Publishing: A Panel
A panel with editors Vijay Seshadri, Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy, Adrian Matejka, Edgar Garcia, and Kirsten Ihns discussing literary publishing.
Vijay Seshadri is the author of the poetry books “Wild Kingdom,” “The Long Meadow,” “The Disappearances,” (Harper-Collins India), “3 Sections,” and, in 2020, “That Was Now, This Is Then,” as well as dozens of essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. His work has been widely published and anthologized and recognized with a number of honors, among them the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Srikanth Reddy is the author of Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), Voyager—named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and NPR—and Facts for Visitors, which won the 2005 Asian American Literary Award. He has written on poetry for The New York Times and The New Republic, and his book of literary criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The NEA, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have awarded him grants and fellowships, and in Fall 2015, he delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, he is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Adrian Matejka was born in Germany as part of a military family. He grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana and is a graduate of Indiana University Bloomington and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His next collection, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017. His mixed media collaboration with Nicholas Galanin and Kevin Neireiter inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books), was published in 2021. His most recent collection of poems, Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), was a finalist for the UNT 2022 Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. His first graphic novel Last On His Feet:Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century was published in February 2023 by Liveright. Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, the Julia Peterkin Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19. He currently lives in Chicago and is Editor of Poetry magazine.
Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. His most recent book, Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is a collection of nine essays that show what this foundational creation story of the Indigenous Americas (the Popol Vuh) has to teach people about the relation between emergency and emergence. His scholarship and poetry are likewise inquiries into the relation between crisis and creativity or world creation—often experimenting with literary and disciplinary form to bring ideas and feelings to life. His other books include Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019). Garcia is Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. He is also currently serving as guest editor in chief of Fence.
Kirsten Ihns grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and she earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first book is sundaey (Propeller Books, 2020), and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hyperallergic, Black Warrior Review, the Iowa Review, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD student and Neubauer Presidential Fellow in English Literature at the University of Chicago, where she studies texts that seem to want to be images, co-curates the emerging poet/artist series Plexiglas at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, and works for Chicago Review.