This series presents readings by a range of emerging, mid-career, and established poets from St. Louis and across the United States. The 100 Boots Poetry Series is co-organized by Jessica Baran, poet and Associate Director of Curatorial and Program Development at Barrett Barrera & Projects Plus Gallery; and Ted Mathys, poet and educator at St. Louis University. At each reading, limited-edition broadsides are available for free to audience members, and a selection of the poets’ books are for sale courtesy of Left Bank Books. The third event of the season features readings by poets Don Mee Choi and Daniel Borzutzky.
Don Mee Choi was born in Seoul and came to the U.S. via Hong Kong. She is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016); The Morning News is Exciting (Action Books, 2010); a chapbook, Petite Manifesto (Vagabond, 2014); and a Wave pamphlet, Freely Frayed. She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, and Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her most recent translation of Kim Hyesoon, a contemporary South Korean poet, is Poor Love Machine (Action Books, 2016) and Autobiography of Death (New Directions, forthcoming). Choi is currently co-editing a book of Yi Sang’s poems and prose for Wave Books with Joshua Beckman.
Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection The Performance of Becoming Human, Daniel Borzutzky is a Chilean-American writer and translator living in Chicago. He is also author of In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015); The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011); The Ecstasy of Capitulations (BlazeVOX Books; 2006), and Failure in the Imagination. Additionally, he has published one collection of fiction titled Arbitrary Tales (Ravenna Press; 2007), and two books of translation, Song for his Disappeared Love by Raul Zurita and Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenun. Borzutzky’s upcoming Lake Michigan will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2018.
