Phoenix Poets Literary Festival: Reading by Dong Li and Annelyse Gelman

April 13, 2023 6:00PM
Experimental Station, 6100 S Blackstone Ave
Participants Photos

Reading by Dong Li and Annelyse Gelman

Reading and Q&A with moderator Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy

Dong Li holds an A.A. degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from Deep Springs College, CA/USA as well as a B.A. degree in comparative literature and an M.F.A. in literary arts (poetry), both from Brown University, Providence, RI/USA. Li’s poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Asia Literary Review, Asymptote, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Cincinnati Review, Circumference, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, Guernica, Hotel Amerika, H.O.W., Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, LVNG, North American Review, PEN America, Plume Poetry, Poor Claudia, Prelude, Quarterly West, Two Lines, The Volta, West Branch, World Literature Today and elsewhere. His work has been translated into German and appeared in manuskripte: Zeitschrift für Literatur. Dong Li was editor-at-large (China) 2014-2015 for the international translation journal Asymptote and hosted literary events in China. He also translates the American essayist Eliot Weinberger into Mandarin Chinese and Chinese poets Song Lin and Zhu Zhu into English.

Annelyse Gelman's work has previously appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, BOMB Magazine, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, the PEN Poetry Series, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and she is the author of the book-length poem Vexations (University of Chicago Press, 2023), the poetry collection Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (Write Bloody, 2014), the handmade artist's book POOL (NECK Press, 2020), and the EP About Repulsion (Fonograf Editions, 2019). She was the inaugural poet-in-residence at UCSD's Brain Observatory in 2012; the Lavinia Winter Fellow at New Pacific Studio in Wairarapa, New Zealand, in 2013; a 2016 Fulbright grantee in Berlin for her work at the intersection of poetry, film, and music; and has been awarded a number of residencies, including at Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland and Fondation Thalie in Belgium. Her poetry-films have been screened in festivals around the world, including in Germany's ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, the FilmPoem Festival in Antwerp, dotdotdot in Vienna, Arcanum Video & Animation Festival in Slovenia, and the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival in Massachussetts. Gelman holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers (2020). In 2019, Gelman launched Midst, a digital publishing platform focused on capturing, sharing, and exploring the writing processes of contemporary poets. Using special word-processing software (engineered by friend and collaborator Jason Gillis-Grier), Midst publishes poems in the form of interactive timelapses, allowing readers to see how each poem was written, from start to finish. Gelman currently serves as Midst's director & curator.